Irving took off his coat, rolled up his shirt sleeve and exhibited for inspection the "cubist art cryptogram" on his left forearm. The official gazed at it closely a minute or two; then said:
"Just wait a minute and I'll have it read."
He lifted a telephone receiver to his ear and called out a local number through the transmitter. Presently he was talking to the desired department.
"Send Kiehler and Joe Weber in here," he said.
Three minutes later two middle-aged men entered. Neither of them was of striking appearance. In fact, each had a rather stolid look, but it was not long before Irving realized that there was some real mechanical, if not imaginative, ability underneath their apparent stupidity.
"Take this young man into your office and read that cipher message on his arm," ordered "the baron."
The two cryptogram readers bowed and one of them requested Irving to follow. They left the office and proceeded to another on the top floor of the building.
It was a very light suite of rooms that Irving now found himself in. One room particularly was supplied with the best of daylight illumination through a skylight overhead. It reminded Irving of an architectural drafting room. Half a dozen men were seated at as many desks working as diligently over record and manuscript material before them as so many college students "cramming" for a trigonometry or chemistry exam. Irving was conducted to an unoccupied desk in a remote corner of the room and there he and his two companions sat down and the consultation began.
The two cryptologists, however, had little to say. They seemed to have little interest in Irving save as to the cipher message he had brought for them to translate. They exhibited no surprise when the boy spy rolled up his sleeve and disclosed the manner in which he had conveyed his message. They seemed to have become so accustomed to the discovery of unusual things that nothing could astonish them. Stolidity of manner was a term that fitted them exactly, but certainly not unqualified stolidity. Irving felt almost as if their eyes burned right into his arm.
They worked diligently for more than an hour over the boy's bared arm, frequently jotting down characters on tabs of paper before them. At last they finished and informed him that he might go.