His escape was probably due to fear. The Hindus are a vengeful lot, and it is no more than possible that the “grapevine cable” had informed him that friends of the men on trial in San Francisco were planning to get even with him for having supplied part of the evidence used against them. Some of that evidence we found in his room at Columbia, and more in his safety deposit box in a Columbus Avenue bank. Among other items was the list of addresses in Switzerland already mentioned, and this was amplified by a letter which we found in Chakravarty’s house, from Sekunna to the little doctor, which read:
“My dear boy,
“Enclosed please find addresses from Wesendonck. Send your reports to: Mr. Director Karl Hirsch, Kreuzlingen, Switzerland.”
Chakravarty, in turn, furnished us with two more codes which were used in writing to these addresses: One which cited pages and word-numbers in a certain German-English dictionary, and a second, based on an entirely different principle. The second and third were often used in the same letter, as this fragment from one of Chakravarty’s reports will show. The letter reads, in part:
“50337069403847695228, 265-3, 331-6, 497-2, 337-10-3, 335-14, 77-11.”
The first series of figures is written in the third code mentioned, and must be deciphered by using the following square:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
1 A B C D E F G
2 H I J K L M N
3 O P Q R S T U
4 V W X Y Z
Each letter is indicated first by the digit marking the horizontal row in which the letter falls, second by the number of the vertical column. Thus “A” is 1-1, or 11: “K” 2-4, or 24, and so on. But if the Hindu wished to transfer a message in cipher, he would not stop with this simple designation of the letters, for they would recur too often and fall too readily under the “laws of repetition” by which most ciphers can be untangled. So after he had his word translated by this square chart, he added four key numbers to it, those key numbers being fixed and permanent, and being added in rotation. In order that we may find out what this word is, we must therefore subtract the key number thus:
Message 50337069403847695228 (or divided into letters)
50 33 70 69 40 38 47 69 52 28
Key numbers 25 11 26 32 25 11 26 32 25 11
Result 25 22 44 37 15 27 21 37 26 17
Consulting our chart again, we see that 25 is “L,” 22 is “I” 44 is “Y,” and that the message deciphers thus:
L I Y U E N H U N G