No wonder I had noticed Gail’s “stylistic” tendency to shun the A in the middle of the piano keyboard, but whenever she did use it, it was always followed by the D below it. “Decoded” down a whole step, these two notes became the letters Q and U.

All you needed now were numbers and you could communicate anything.

“Opus 38,” she’d called it. The next two notes would have to be how she was going to symbolize 3 and 8.

They were flat notes, E-flat and G-flat. Significantly, there were only four remaining pitches in the chromatic scale that hadn’t been taken by a letter: A-flat, D-flat, E-flat, and G-flat. I tried constructing a scale of just those four pitches on the staff above my letter scale, the A-flat representing the number 1 aligned with the first A in my letter scale below it.

Sure enough, the next two notes in the melody line matched the numbers 3 and 8. I’d completed what I hoped was my Rosetta Stone: the key to Gail’s Swing code, by which virtually any message could be conveyed using little more than three octaves of music. All you needed were the musical parts and the master “key” to the piece (in this case “A Bach Ache,” which was on the reverse side of the dedication page that Gail had turned over to Fumio Dakuzaku).

Placing my reconstructed letter-and-number code on the dresser in front of me, I tried applying it to the next two pages of the Photostatic score. I merely took each note in the order it occurred, and where there was more than one note on any given beat or subdivision of a beat, I tried “spelling” out the notes in order from lowest to highest, as is generally the practice among musicians. I added periods where they seemed appropriate.

It all worked.

And dear God, how I wished it hadn’t.

For what I’d thought was Gail’s jaunty, harmonically audacious intro to Swing was now revealed to be the words, “A BACH ACHE OPUS 38 TOP SECRET DECISION HAS BEEN MADE BY US NAVAL—

I felt foolish in more ways than I knew how to count. And yet a single emotion was greater than all my chagrin, embarrassment, and humiliation: fear. For even the very best interpretation I could put on all I’d discovered told me that Gail was lost in a dark place where I might not be able to protect her.

I hurriedly threw on my stage suit and called RC Copying. Gil Rice answered. I asked him how late his office would be open.

“Everybody wants everything for the next morning. I got three guys should be here until midnight at least.”

I asked him if I could lease a table, pen, ink, and paper from him and work through the night if need be. I told him I wouldn’t be able to be there until one A.M.