Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Epigraph
Contents
Author’s Note: Prying Eyes
Part I: Riverbank
Chapter 1: Fabyan
Chapter 2: Unbelievable, Yet It Was There
Chapter 3: Bacon’s Ghost
Chapter 4: He Who Fears Is Half Dead
Chapter 5: The Escape Plot
Part II: Target Practice
Part III: The Invisible War
Chapter 1: Grandmother Died
Chapter 2: Magic
Chapter 3: The Hauptsturmführer and the Funkmeister
Chapter 4: Circuit 3-N
Chapter 5: The Doll Lady
Chapter 6: Hitler’s Lair
Epilogue: Girl Cryptanalyst and All That
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
About the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
(George C. Marshall Research Foundation)
EPIGRAPH
The king hath note of all that they intend,
By interception which they dream not of.
—SHAKESPEARE, HENRY V, 1599
Knowledge itself is power.
—FRANCIS BACON, SACRED MEDITATIONS, 1597
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Epigraph
Author’s Note: Prying Eyes
Part I: Riverbank
Chapter 1: Fabyan
Chapter 2: Unbelievable, Yet It Was There
Chapter 3: Bacon’s Ghost
Chapter 4: He Who Fears Is Half Dead
Chapter 5: The Escape Plot
Part II: Target Practice
Part III: The Invisible War
Chapter 1: Grandmother Died
Chapter 2: Magic
Chapter 3: The Hauptsturmführer and the Funkmeister
Chapter 4: Circuit 3-N
Chapter 5: The Doll Lady
Chapter 6: Hitler’s Lair
Epilogue: Girl Cryptanalyst and All That
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
About the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Prying Eyes
This is a love story.
In 1916, during the First World War, two young Americans met by chance on a mysterious and now-forgotten estate near Chicago. At first they seemed to have little in common. She was Elizebeth Smith, a Quaker schoolteacher who found joy in poetry. He was William Friedman, a Jewish plant biologist from a poor family. But they fell for each other. Within a year they were married. They went on to change history together, in ways that still mark our lives today. They taught themselves to be spies—of a new and vital kind.
What they learned to do, better than anyone in the world, was reveal the written secrets of others. They were codebreakers, people who solve secret messages without knowing the key. Puzzle solvers. In a time when there were only a handful of experienced codebreakers in the entire country, the two lovers became a sort of family codebreaking bureau, a husband-and-wife duo unlike any that existed before or has since. Computers didn’t exist, so they used pencil, paper, and their brains.
Over the course of thirty years, while raising two children, Elizebeth and William Friedman unscrambled thousands of messages spanning two world wars, prying loose secrets about smuggling networks, gangsters, organized crime, foreign armies, and fascism. They also invented new techniques that transformed the science of secret writing, known as cryptology. Today the insights of this one couple lurk at the base of everything from huge government agencies to the smallest fluctuations of our online lives. And the Friedmans did it all despite having little to no training in mathematics. The basic unit of their life was not the equation but the word. At heart they were people who loved words—words kneaded and pulled and torn, words flipped and arranged in grids and squares and strips and in lines marching down the pale sheet of scratch paper.
In the decades since the Second World War, the husband, William Friedman, has become a revered figure to intelligence historians. He is called the world’s greatest cryptologist
by the eminent chronicler of secret writing David Kahn: Singlehandedly,
Kahn writes, he made his country preeminent in his field.
William Friedman is also widely considered to be the father of the National Security Agency, the part of the U.S. government that intercepts foreign communications and sifts them for information—signals intelligence.
He wrote the definitive textbooks that trained generations of NSA analysts who are still working today. In 1975 the agency named its main auditorium after William Friedman, at its headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland, and a bronze bust of William’s head still stands guard there, above a plaque that reads CRYPTOLOGIC PIONEER AND INVENTOR, FOUNDER OF THE SCIENCE OF MODERN AMERICAN CRYPTOLOGY.
Today Elizebeth isn’t nearly as famous, despite her talent and contributions. Early on she worked side by side with William and collaborated on several of their groundbreaking scientific papers; she was considered by some of their friends to be the more brilliant of the pair; she ultimately carved out a spectacular career of her own; and by 1945 the government considered both Friedmans to be pioneers of their field. A then-secret document said of Elizebeth, She and her husband are among the founders of American military cryptanalysis
—cryptanalysis is another word for codebreaking—and a federal prosecutor told the FBI that Mrs. Friedman and her husband . . . are recognized as the leading authorities in the country.
Yet in the canonical books about twentieth-century codebreaking, Elizebeth is treated as the dutiful, slightly colorful wife of a great man, a digression from the main narrative, if not a footnote. Her victories are all but forgotten.
I started reading about the Friedmans in 2014, after Edward Snowden shocked the world by revealing that the NSA was gathering the phone records of millions of ordinary Americans. Curious to know more about Elizebeth, I found a brief bio on the website of a Virginia library, along with a set of pictures. There she was, a petite woman in a white dress, standing on a patch of grass almost one hundred years ago, skin porcelain, head cocked at the photographer, smiling and squinting slightly in what must have been a blinding sun.
The library held the Friedmans’ personal papers. One morning I drove down to Virginia and asked the chief archivist to show me what Elizebeth had left. In the back of an office, he unlocked a solid gray metal door and an inner door of silver metal bars, led me into a darkened, humidity-controlled vault, and pointed to multiple shelves of gray archival boxes, twenty-two boxes in all. We try to tell people that Elizebeth’s stuff is amazing,
the archivist said, but usually researchers want to see William’s papers.
You get these moments sometimes as a journalist, if you’re lucky. You hear a voice that bursts from a body or a page with beauty or urgency or insight. Elizebeth’s boxes contained hundreds of her letters. Love letters. Letters to her kids written in code. Handwritten diaries. A partial, unpublished autobiography. I’m not a mathematician, and I’ll never be an expert on codes and ciphers, but Elizebeth’s descriptions of her work gave me a sense of what it must have felt like to be her—the excitement of solving the kind of puzzle that could save a life or nudge a war. She liked to say that codes are all around us: in children’s report cards, in slang, in headlines and movies and songs. Codebreaking is about noticing and manipulating patterns. Humans do this without thinking. We’re wired to see patterns. Codebreakers train themselves to see more deeply.
As rich as Elizebeth’s papers were, they struck me as incomplete. The records trailed off around 1940. What was she doing in the Second World War? No one seemed to know.
It took me almost two years to find the answer. She spent the war catching Nazi spies, among other little-known feats. Working with an elite codebreaking unit that she founded in 1931 and collaborating closely with both British and U.S. intelligence, Elizebeth became a secret detective, a Sherlock Holmes on the trail of fascist agents infiltrating the Western Hemisphere. She tracked and exposed them, smashing the spy rings, ruining Nazi dreams.
In a broader sense, she filled gaps in agencies that weren’t prepared for the battle of wits that now faced them, a pattern that repeated throughout her entire career. The FBI, the CIA, the NSA—to different degrees Elizebeth pressed her thumb into the clay of all these agencies when the clay was still wet. She helped to shape them and she battled them, too, a woman hammering herself into the history of what we now call the intelligence community.
But when powerful men started telling the story, they left her out of it. In 1945, Elizebeth’s spy files were stamped with classification tags and entombed in government archives, and officials made her swear an oath of secrecy about her work in the war. So she had to sit silent and watch others seize credit for her accomplishments, particularly J. Edgar Hoover. A gifted salesman, Hoover successfully portrayed the FBI as the major hero in the Nazi spy hunt. Public gratitude flowed to Hoover, increasing his already considerable power, making him an American icon, virtually untouchable until his death in 1972.
It’s not quite true that history is written by the winners. It’s written by the best publicists on the winning team.
What follows is my attempt to put back together a puzzle that was fragmented by secrecy, sexism, and time. I relied on the Friedmans’ letters and papers, declassified U.S. and British government files, Freedom of Information Act requests, and my own interviews. Anything between quotation marks in this book is from a letter or other primary source document.
In these files I found a story of a true American adventure. A young woman with no money or connections is hired during the First World War by a millionaire to probe an odd theory about the works of Shakespeare. Through the millionaire’s sleight of hand and the urgencies of war, this eccentric literary project turns into a life-or-death hunt for actual enemy secrets, one that spawns a completely new science of codebreaking. The woman goes on in the 1930s to become one of the world’s most famous codebreakers, a front-page celebrity, before the government recruits her for one of the most closely guarded missions of the Second World War. And through it all she serves as muse and colleague to her husband, a troubled genius who lays the foundation of modern surveillance.
All democracies ride the line between security and transparency, secrecy and disclosure. What do people have a right to know? What must stay secret and why? The Friedmans lived these tensions more deeply than most. Their journey took them to great heights in the service of their country—and also to the depths of paranoia, poverty, and madness.
Jason Fagone
PHILADELPHIA
Terminology: A Cheat Sheet
You don’t need to know math to enjoy this book, just a bit of lingo.
A code is a fixed relationship between one set of symbols or ideas and another. It can be a very ordinary and everyday thing. Slang is code, emoji are code. Think of Paul Revere hanging lamps in the Boston steeple to signal the route of the British invasion: one if by land, two if by sea. That’s a code.
A cipher is a rule for altering the letters in a message. Usually it involves a one-to-one exchange: one letter gets replaced with one other letter, or a digit. For instance, if A=B, B=C, and so on, SMASH becomes TNBTI.
A cryptogram is a catchall term for a string of garbled text, solution unknown. It can be generated by a code or a cipher.
You can think of codes and ciphers as different sorts of locks that protect words, like a padlock protects money in a safe. In this analogy, the security professionals who make the locks and the keys are called cryptographers, and the thieves who try to pick the locks without having the keys are called either codebreakers or cryptanalysts, two terms that mean exactly the same thing.
The broad science of codes and ciphers—making them, breaking them, studying them, writing about them—is cryptology.
At different points in their careers, Elizebeth and William were asked to make codes, and they were good at this task, but their most significant feats involved codebreaking. They snuck into vaults of text, sometimes alone, sometimes together, feeling for the click of the bolt. Their lives became a series of increasingly spectacular and improbable heists. They used science to steal truth.
PART I
RIVERBANK
1916–1920
CHAPTER 1
Fabyan
Sixty years after she got her first job in codebreaking, when Elizebeth was an old woman, the National Security Agency sent a female representative to her apartment in Washington, D.C. The NSA woman had a tape recorder and a list of questions. Elizebeth suddenly craved a cigarette.
It had been several days since she smoked.
Do you want a cigarette, by the way?
Elizebeth asked her guest, then realized she was all out.
No, do you smoke?
Elizebeth was embarrassed. No, no!
Then she admitted that she did smoke and just didn’t want a cigarette badly enough to leave the apartment.
The woman offered to go get some.
Oh, don’t worry, Elizebeth said, the liquor store was two blocks away, it wasn’t worth the trouble.
They started. The date was November 11, 1976, nine days after the election of Jimmy Carter. The wheels of the tape recorder spun. The agency was documenting Elizebeth’s responses for its classified history files. The interviewer, an NSA linguist named Virginia Valaki, wanted to know about certain events in the development of American codebreaking and intelligence, particularly in the early days, before the NSA and the CIA existed, and the FBI was a mere embryo—these mighty empires that grew to shocking size from nothing at all, like planets from grains of dust, and not so long ago.
Elizebeth had never given an interview to the NSA. She had always been wary of the agency, for reasons the agency knew well—reasons woven into her story and into theirs. But the interviewer was kind and respectful, and Elizebeth was eighty-four years old, and what did anything matter anymore? So she got to talking.
Her recall was impressive. Only one or two questions gave her trouble. Other things she remembered perfectly but couldn’t explain because the events remained mysterious in her own mind. Nobody would believe it unless you had been there,
she said, and laughed.
The interviewer returned again and again to the topic of Riverbank Laboratories, a bizarre institution now abandoned, a place that helped create the modern NSA but which the NSA knew little about. Elizebeth and her future husband, William Friedman, had lived there when they were young, between 1916 and 1920, when they discovered a series of techniques and patterns that changed cryptology forever. Valaki wanted to know: What in the world happened at Riverbank? And how did two know-nothings in their early twenties turn into the best codebreakers the United States had ever seen—seemingly overnight? I’d be grateful for any information you can give on Riverbank,
Valaki said. You see, I don’t know enough to . . . even to ask the first questions.
Over the course of several hours, Valaki kept pushing Elizebeth to peel back the layers of various Riverbank discoveries, to describe how the solution to puzzle A became new method B that pointed to the dawn of C, but Elizebeth lingered instead on descriptions of people and places. History had smoothed out all the weird edges. She figured she was the last person alive who might remember the crags of things, the moments of uncertainty and luck, the wild accelerations. The analyst asked about one particular scientific leap six different times; the old woman gave six slightly different answers, some meandering, some brief, including one that is written in the NSA transcript as Hah! ((Laughs.))
Toward the end of the conversation, Elizebeth asked if she had thought to tell the story of how she ended up at Riverbank in the first place, working for the man who built it, a man named George Fabyan. It was a story she had told a few times over the years, a memory outlined in black. Valaki said no, Elizebeth hadn’t already told this part. Well, I better give you that,
Elizebeth said. It’s not only very, very amusing, but it’s actually true syllable by syllable.
Alright.
You want me to do that now?
Elizebeth said.
Absolutely.
The first time she saw George Fabyan, in June 1916, he was climbing out of a chauffeured limousine in front of the Newberry Library in Chicago, a tall stout man being expelled from the vehicle like a clog from a pipe.
She had gone to the library alone to look at a rare volume of Shakespeare and to ask if the librarians knew of any jobs in the literature or research fields. Within minutes, to her confusion and mystification, a limousine was pulling up to the curb.
Elizebeth Smith was twenty-three years old, five foot three, and between 110 and 120 pounds, with short dark-brown curls and hazel eyes. Her clothes gave her away as a country girl on an adventure. She wore a crisp gray dress of ribbed fabric, its white cuffs and high pilgrim collar imparting a severe appearance to her small body as she stood in the lobby and watched Fabyan through the library’s glass front doors.
He entered and stormed toward her, a huge man with blazing blue eyes. His clothes were more haggard than Elizebeth would have expected for a person of his apparent wealth. He wore an enormous and slightly tattered cutaway coat and striped trousers. His mustache and beard were iron gray, and his uncombed hair was the same shade. His breath shook the hairs of his beard.
Fabyan approached. The height differential between them was more than a foot; he dwarfed her across every dimension. With an abrupt motion he stepped closer, frowning. She had the impression of a windmill or a pyramid being tipped down over her.
Will you come to Riverbank and spend the night with me?
Fabyan said.
Elizebeth didn’t understand any part of this sentence. She didn’t know what he meant by spending the night or what Riverbank was. She struggled for a response, finally stammering a few words. Oh, sir, I don’t have anything with me to spend the night away from my room.
That’s all right,
Fabyan said. We’ll furnish you anything you want. Anything you need, we have it. Come on!
Then, to her surprise, Fabyan grabbed Elizebeth under one elbow, practically lifting her by the arm. Her body stiffened in response. He marched her out of the library and swept her into the waiting limousine.
People often guessed that she was meek because she was small. She hated this, the assumption that she was harmless, ordinary. She despised her own last name for the same reason; it seemed to give people an excuse to forget her.
The odious name of Smith,
she called it once, in a diary she began keeping at age twenty. It seems that when I am introduced to a stranger by this most meaningless of phrases, plain ‘Miss Smith,’ that I shall be forever in that stranger’s estimation, eliminated from any category even approaching anything interesting or at all uncommon.
There was nothing to be done: changing her name would cause horrendous insult to blood relations, and complaining provided no satisfaction, because whenever she did, people asked why she didn’t just change her name, a response so inanely disgusting
that it made her feel violent. I feel like snipping out the tongues of any and all who indulge in such common, senseless, and inane pleasantries.
Her family members had never shared this fear of being ordinary. They were midwestern people of modest means, Quakers from Huntington, Indiana, a rural town known for its rock quarries. Her father, John Marion Smith, traced his lineage to an English Quaker who sailed to America in 1682 on the same boat as William Penn. In Huntington he worked as a farmer and served in local government as a Republican. (My Indiana family,
Elizebeth later wrote, were hide-bound Republicans who had never under any instances voted for any other ticket.
) Her mother, Sopha Strock, a housewife, delivered ten children to John, the first when she was only seventeen. One died in infancy; nine survived. Elizebeth was the last of the nine, and by the time she was born, on August 26, 1892, most of her brothers and sisters had already grown up and scattered. She got along with only two or three, particularly a sister named Edna, two years her elder, a practical girl who later married a dentist and moved to Detroit.
Sopha had decided to spell Elizebeth
in a nonstandard way, with ze instead of the usual za, perhaps sensing that her ninth child named Smith would want something to set her apart in the world. But Elizebeth didn’t need the hitch in her first name to know she was different. Prone to recurring fits of nausea that began in adolescence and plagued her for years, she had trouble sitting still and keeping her tongue. She clashed with her father, a pragmatic, stubborn man who ordered his children around and believed women should marry young. She questioned her parents’ faith. John and Sopha, though not devout, were part of a Quaker community and believed what Quakers do: that war is wrong, silence concentrates goodness, and direct contact with God is possible. Elizebeth’s God was more diffuse: We call a lot of things luck that are but the outcome of our own bad endeavor,
she wrote in the diary, but there is undoubtedly something outside ourselves that sometimes wins for us, or loses, irrespective of ourselves. What is it? Is it God?
Her father didn’t want Elizebeth to go to college. She defied him and sent applications to multiple schools, vowing to pay her own tuition; a friend later recalled that she was full of determination and energy to get a college education with no help or encouragement from her father.
(John Smith did end up loaning her some money—at 4 percent interest.) After being rejected from Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, a top Quaker school, she settled on Wooster College in Ohio, studying Greek and English literature there between 1911 and 1913. Then her mother fell ill with cancer and Elizebeth transferred to another small liberal arts school, Hillsdale College in Michigan, to be closer to home. At both schools she earned tuition money as a seamstress for hire. Her dorm rooms were always cluttered with dresses in progress and stray ribbons of chiffon.
College took Elizebeth’s innate tendency to doubt and gave it a structure, a justification. At Wooster and Hillsdale she discovered poetry and philosophy, two methods of exploring the unknown, two scalpels for carving up fact and thought. She studied the works of Shakespeare and Alfred, Lord Tennyson, carrying books of their poems and plays around campus, annotating and underlining the pages until the leaves separated from the bindings. A course on philosophy introduced her to a new hero, the Renaissance scholar Erasmus, who believed in one aristocracy—the aristocracy of intellect,
she wrote in a paper. He had one faith—faith in the power of thought, in the supremacy of ideas.
Elizebeth, a smart person from a working-class family, found this concept liberating: the measure of a person was her ideas, not her wealth or her command of religious texts. She wrote a poem about this epiphany:
I sit stunned, nerveless, amid the ruins
Of my fallen idols. The iconoclast Philosophy
Has shattered for me
My God . . .
But through the confusing ruins, Faith, still hoping,
Somehow raises her hands and bids me—
Yearn on! Finally
Through the mazes of error and doubt and mistrust
You will come, weary heart
To the final conclusion upon which you will build anew.
You will find triumphant
The Working Hypothesis,
The Solid Rock.
In addition to the well-worn volumes of Shakespeare and Tennyson, she lugged her own diary from place to place, a book with a soft black binding that said Record
on the cover in silver script. The round-cornered pages were lined. She wrote in wet black ink with a quill pen, in a slanted cursive hand that was not too beautiful, about the importance of choosing the right words for things, even if those words offended people. She didn’t like it when she heard a friend say that a person who had died had passed away
or that a staggering drunk at a party was a bit indisposed.
It was more important to be honest. We glide over the offensiveness of names and calm down our consciences by eulogistic mellifluous terms, until our very moral senses are dulled,
she wrote. Let things be shown, let them come forth in their real colors, and humanity will not be so prone to a sin which is glossed over by a dainty public!
Sometimes Elizebeth had trouble channeling these energies and frustrations into cogent work. Her professors found her intensely bright, yet unfocused and argumentative. More than one told her, she said, that I have marvelous abilities, yet do not use them.
A philosophy professor wrote on the back of her Erasmus paper, Very suggestive, with lots of good ideas and phrases. Also novel. But the style is choppy and the ideas are not in proper sequence.
Next to these words Elizebeth scribbled a defiant note, dismissing the criticism on the grounds that she had recently won second place in a state oratorical contest.
She found herself attracted to male artists. Attending a choral concert one night, my musical heart was carried completely away by a baritone,
she wrote. He loved the very act of singing—it could be seen in his eyes, in his mouth, in his very hands, as they irrepressibly moved in half-gestures. It made me want to be able to sing well myself, so badly that—well, I just couldn’t sit still with the desire of it.
At Hillsdale she dated a poet named Harold Van Kirk, called Van by his friends, handsome and athletic. He typed French sonnets for her and later joined the army and moved to New York. Van’s roommate, Carleton Brooks Miller, wooed her when the relationship with Van fell apart, urging Elizebeth to read James Branch Cabell’s erotic science fiction novel Jurgen because it reveals the naked man-soul as it is.
Carleton joined the army, too, then became the minister of a Congregational church near the college, writing to Elizebeth a few years later that he was still looking for a mate.
When graduation came around in the spring of 1915, Elizebeth still felt like a quivering, keenly alive, restless, mental question mark.
She had no sense of where to go or what she wanted to do with her life. That fall she accepted a position as the substitute principal of a county high school twenty miles west of her childhood home. The landscape of small-town Indiana was depressingly familiar to Elizebeth, and while she enjoyed parts of her job—she taught classes in addition to running the school—she also felt trapped. For an educated American woman in 1915, teaching at the high school level or below was what you did. Almost 90 percent of professors at public universities were male; only 939 women in the country received master’s degrees in 1915, and 62 women earned Ph.D.s. Elizebeth had arrived at the last stop on a dreary train. There was no path from teaching that led anywhere else she might want to go. A woman taught, had kids, retired, died.
All her life, Elizebeth assumed that her restlessness was a defect that adulthood would somehow remove. She had called it this little, elusive, buried splinter
and hoped for it to be pricked from my mind.
But she was learning to see the splinter as a permanent piece of her, impossible to remove. I am never quite so gleeful as when I am doing something labeled as an ‘ought not.’ Why is it? Am I abnormal? Why should something with a risk in it give me an exuberant feeling inside me? I don’t know what it is unless it is that characteristic which makes so many people remark that I should have been born a man.
Wanting something more, and ready to take a risk, Elizebeth quit her job at the Indiana high school in the spring of 1916 and moved back in with her parents to think about what was next. She soon remembered how unpleasant it was to live with her father. She reached her limit and packed a suitcase in early June. Nervous, but forcing herself to be brave, she boarded a train for Chicago, hoping to find a new job there, or at least a new direction.
That month, the war in Europe—the First World War, then called the Great War
—was two years old. America had not yet joined the battle. Woodrow Wilson was finishing his first term as president and campaigning for reelection in November on a platform of peace. More than a thousand Republican delegates had just kicked off their national convention to nominate a challenger to Wilson. They were gathered in the same city that now lured Elizebeth: Chicago, the young capital of the Midwest, an upstart empire of stockyards and skyscrapers.
The scale of the city jangled her. Pedestrians brushed past each other on sidewalks that cut mazes through the downtown office buildings, banks, apartments, hotels. It rained most every day, a cold, miserable rain, sheets of fat, icy drops that saturated the wool coats of the political delegates and swamped the grass at the baseball parks, canceling Cubs and White Sox games. Elizebeth stayed in the apartment of a friend on the South Side and ventured out each morning in search of work, visiting job agencies and presenting her qualifications. She told the receptionists she would like to work in literature or research. She pictured herself at a desk in a room of desks, taking notes with a sharp pencil. Not clerical work but something that required the brain. The people at the job agencies said they were sorry, but they didn’t have anything like that.
She had no other cards to play. No money or connections, no means of bending Chicago to her will. She felt small and anonymous. After a week she decided to return home.
Before boarding the train, though, she wanted to make one more stop in the city, at a place she had heard about, the Newberry Library, which owned a rare copy of the First Folio of William Shakespeare, a book whose backstory had intrigued her when she learned it in college. The Bard’s plays were never collected and printed in one place during his lifetime, because the culture in which he worked, Queen Elizabeth I’s England, revered the spoken word above the written. It wasn’t until 1623, seven years after his death, when a group of admirers gathered thirty-six of Shakespeare’s comedies and tragedies in a single hefty volume that came to be known as the First Folio. Simply publishing the book was a radical act, a statement that the phrases of a playwright deserved to be documented with the same care as the Gospels. A team of London artisans produced about a thousand copies, each typeset and bound by hand. Five men memorized portions of the plays to help them set type faster, stacking metal letters one by one into words and sentences.
Over the centuries, most of the copies were lost or destroyed. The Newberry had one of the few on display in America. So, on what she thought would be her final day in Chicago, Elizebeth made her way to the library.
The library was an odd institution, created by a dead man’s will and a quirk of fate. A rich merchant named Walter Newberry died on a steamship in 1868. The crew preserved his body for the remainder of the voyage in an empty rum cask before returning it to his beloved city, where lawyers discovered that Newberry had left behind almost $2,150,000 for the construction of a public library.
According to his will, the library had to be free to use, and it had to be located in North Chicago. These were the only conditions. The library didn’t even have books to start with, because three years after Newberry’s death, his own hoard of rare volumes was destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.
The slate of the library was blank. Now the library’s trustees wrote their status anxieties upon it. These were wealthy Chicago businessmen who felt they lived in one of the finest cities in the world and were painfully aware that the world did not agree. For all of Chicago’s sudden material success, its skyscrapers and factories and department store empires and slaughterhouses, it lacked the institutions of art and music and science that elevated New York and Boston and Paris in traditional measures of civic greatness but omitted Chicago and made its large men feel small.
They wished to prove that they were men of culture and refinement, and they were willing to spend whatever it took.
This was the same insecurity that drove the fathers of Chicago to raise the dreamlike White City, the temporary pavilions of the Chicago World’s Fair that soared along the southern edge of the lake in the summer of 1893. The White City exhibited the future in prototype, pieces of an unfinished puzzle. On August 26, 1893, a day of demonstrations at the Palace of Mechanical Arts, a building twice as large as the U.S. Capitol, the palace rumbled and whirred with machines that turned raw sugar into candy, made sausages and horseshoe nails and bricks, and sewed ten thousand button holes per hour. All day long one hundred thousand people wandered the sprawling aisles, eardrums split by machine roar, drinking lemonade that spurted from a fountain. An entire newspaper was printed in exactly sixty-three minutes starting with raw planks of wood that were pulped as people watched. Everywhere was a demonstration of the almost irresistible power of mind when matter is set to do its bidding,
the Tribune reported. The world’s tallest man, Colonel H. C. Thurston of Texas, eight foot one and a half in boots, mingled with the throngs, and in the afternoon fifty thousand gathered outdoors to watch a fat man dive for a bologna sausage that dangled from a pole above the lake’s lagoon.
This was the day Elizebeth turned one year old in Indiana. And as crowds of Americans roamed the White City in awe, builders completed construction of the Newberry Library, ten miles north of the noisy fairgrounds, and the first patrons entered the library in reverent silence.
Unlike the White City, a spectacle for the masses, the library was designed as a select affair
for the better and cleaner classes,
the Chicago Times wrote with approval when the Newberry first opened. It was an imposing five-story building of tan granite blocks. All visitors had to fill out a slip stating the purpose of their research and they were turned away if they could not specify a topic. The books, available for reference only, were shelved in reading rooms modeled after the home libraries of wealthy gentlemen, cozy and intimate spaces containing the rarest and most sophisticated books that vulgar Chicago money could buy. During the library’s first decades, the masters of the Newberry acquired books with the single-mindedness of hog merchants. They bought hundreds of incunabula, printed volumes from before 1501, written by monks. They bought fragile, faded books written by hand on unusual materials, on leather and wood and parchment and vellum. They bought mysterious books of disputed patrimony, books whose past lives they did not know and could not explain. One book on the Newberry’s shelves featured Arabic script and a supple, leathery binding. Inside were two inscriptions. The first said that the book had been found in the palace of the king of Delhi, September 21st, 1857,
seven days after a mutiny. The second inscription said, Bound in human skin.
In one especially significant transaction, the library acquired six thousand books from a Cincinnati hardware merchandiser, a haul that included a Fourth Folio of Shakespeare from 1685, a Second Folio from 1632, and most exceptional of all, the First Folio of 1623, the original printing of Shakespeare’s plays.
This is the book that Elizebeth Smith was determined to see in June 1916, when she was twenty-three.
Opening the glass front door of the Newberry, she walked through a small vestibule into a magnificent Romanesque lobby. A librarian at a desk stopped her and sized her up. Normally Elizebeth would have been required to fill out the form with her research topic, but she had gotten lucky. The year 1916 happened to be the three hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, and libraries around the country, including the Newberry, were mounting exhibitions in celebration.
Elizebeth said she was here to see the First Folio. The librarian said it was part of the exhibition and pointed to a room on the first floor, to the left. Elizebeth approached. The Folio was on display under glass.
The book was large and dense, about 13 inches tall and 8 inches wide, and almost dictionary-thick, running to nine hundred pages. The binding was red and made of highly polished goatskin, with a large grain. The pages had gilded edges. It was opened to a pair of pages in the front, the light gray paper tinged with yellow due to age. She saw an engraving of a man in an Elizabethan-era collar and jacket, his head mostly bald except for two neatly combed hanks of hair that ended at his ears. The text said:
MR. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARES
COMEDIES,
HISTORIES, &
TRAGEDIES.
Publifhed according to the True Originall Copies.
LONDON
Printed by Ifaac Iaggard, and Ed. Blount. 1623.
Elizebeth later wrote that seeing the Folio gave her the same feeling that an archaeologist has, when he suddenly realizes that he has discovered a tomb of a great pharaoh.
One of the librarians, a young woman, must have noticed the expression of entrancement on her face, because now she walked over to Elizebeth and asked if she was interested in Shakespeare. They got to talking and realized they had a lot in common. The librarian had grown up in Richmond, Indiana, not far from Elizebeth’s hometown, and they were both from Quaker families.
Elizebeth felt comfortable enough to mention that she was looking for a job in literature or research. I would like something unusual,
she said.
The librarian thought for a second. Yes, that reminded her of Mr. Fabyan. She pronounced the name with a long a, like Faybe-yin.
Elizebeth had never heard the name, so the librarian explained. George Fabyan was a wealthy Chicago businessman who often visited the library to examine the First Folio. He said he believed the book contained secret messages written in cipher, and he had made it known that he wished to hire an assistant, preferably a young, personable, attractive college graduate who knew English literature,
to further this research. Would Elizebeth be interested in a position like that?
Elizebeth was too startled to know what to say.
Shall I call him up?
the librarian asked.
Well, yes, I wish you would, please,
Elizebeth said.
The librarian went off for a few moments, then signaled to Elizebeth. Mr. Fabyan would be right over, she said.
Elizebeth thought: What?
Yes, Mr. Fabyan happened to be in Chicago today. He would be here any minute.
Sure enough, Fabyan soon arrived in his limousine. He burst into the library, asked Elizebeth the question that so bewildered and stunned her—Will you come to Riverbank and spend the night with me?
—and led her by the arm to the waiting vehicle.
This is Bert,
he growled, nodding at his chauffeur, Bert Williams. Fabyan climbed in with Elizebeth in the back.
From the Newberry, the chauffeur drove them south and west for twenty blocks until they arrived at the soaring Roman columns of the Chicago & North Western Terminal, one of the busiest of the city’s five railway stations. Fabyan hurried her out of the limo, up the steps, between the columns, and into the nine-hundred-foot-long train shed, a vast, darkened shaft of platforms and train cars and people rushing every which way. She asked Fabyan if she could send a message to her family at the telegraph office in the station, letting them know her whereabouts. Fabyan said no, that wasn’t necessary, and there wasn’t any time.
She followed him toward a Union Pacific car. Fabyan and Elizebeth climbed aboard at the back end. Fabyan walked her all the way to the front of the car and told her to sit in the frontmost seat, by the window. Then he went galumphing back through the car saying hello to the other passengers, seeming to recognize several, gossiping with them about this and that, and joking with the conductor in a matey voice while Elizebeth waited in her window seat and the train did not move. It sat there, and sat there, and sat there, and a bubble of panic suddenly popped in her stomach, the hot acid rising to her throat.
Where am I?
she thought to herself. "Who am I? Where am I going? I may be on the other side of the world tonight." She wondered if she should get up, right that second, while Fabyan had his back turned, and run.
But she remained still until Fabyan had finished talking to the other passengers and came tramping back to the front of the car. He packed his big body into the seat opposite hers. She smiled at him, trying to be proper and polite, like she had been taught, and not wanting to offend a millionaire; she had grown up in modest enough circumstances to be wary of the rich and their power.
Then Fabyan did something she would remember all her life. He rocked forward, jabbed his reddened face to within inches of hers, fixed his blue eyes on her hazel ones, and thundered, loud enough for everyone in the car to hear, Well, WHAT IN HELL DO YOU KNOW?
Elizebeth leaned away from Fabyan and his question. It inflamed something stubborn in her. She turned her head away in a gesture of disrespect, resting her cheek against the window to create some distance. The pilgrim collar of her dress touched the cold glass. From that position she shot Fabyan a sphinxy, sidelong gaze.
That remains, sir, for you to find out,
she said.
It occurred to her afterward that this was the most immoral remark she had ever made in her life. Fabyan loved it. He leaned way back, making the seat squeak with his weight, and unloosed a great roaring laugh that slammed through the train car and caromed off the thin steel walls.
Then his facial muscles slackened into an expression clearly meant to convey deep thought, and as the train lurched forward, finally leaving the station, he began to talk of Shakespeare, the reason he had sought her out.
Hamlet, he said. Julius Caesar, Romeo and Juliet, The Tempest, the sonnets—the most famous written works in the world. Countless millions had read them, quoted them, memorized them, performed them, used pieces of them in everyday speech without even knowing. Yet all those readers had missed something. A hidden order, a secret of indescribable magnitude.
Out the train window, the grid of Chicago gave way to the silos and pale yellow vistas of the prairie. Each second she was getting pulled more deeply into the scheme of this stranger, destination unknown.
The First Folio, he continued. The Shakespeare book at the Newberry Library. It wasn’t what it seemed. The words on the page, which appeared to be describing the wounds and treacheries of lovers and kings, in fact told a completely different story, a secret story, using an ingenious system of secret writing. The messages revealed that the author of the plays was not William Shakespeare. The true author, and the man who had concealed the messages, was in fact Francis Bacon, the pioneering scientist and philosopher-king of Elizabethan England.
Elizebeth looked at the rich man. She could tell he believed what he was saying.
Fabyan went on. He said that a brilliant female scholar who worked for him, Mrs. Elizabeth Wells Gallup, had already succeeded in unweaving the plays and isolating Bacon’s hidden threads. But for reasons that would become clear, Mrs. Gallup needed an assistant with youthful energy and sharp eyes. This is why Fabyan wanted Elizebeth to join him and Mrs. Gallup at Riverbank—his private home, his 350-acre estate, but also so much more.
Genius scientists lived there, on his payroll, working in laboratories unlike any on earth. Celebrities made pilgrimages to get a glimpse of projects under way. Teddy Roosevelt, his personal friend. P. T. Barnum. Famous actresses. Riverbank was a place of wonders. She would see.
After they’d been riding west for ninety
