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“A movie about a tire?” asked Billy. “Or maybe it means tired? Exhausted?”

“No, ‘tire,’” said Olivier. “French. It means shoot.” He turned to Armand. “Shoot? A gun? Is that the message?”

“My God,” said Ruth. “You’re all idiots. How is it I can see what it says and you can’t?”

“It’s because you’re looking through a telescope,” said Gabri. “You could see the markings on Jupiter with that thing, you old witch.”

“Bitch,” she said to him.

“Children,” said Armand. Though he knew they were not really fighting. This was their own code, baffling, sometimes offensive to others, but their way of showing affection. The more Ruth insulted a person, the more she cared about them.

“‘Tiro,’” said Sylvie Mongeau, then repeated it. “‘Tiro.’ That’s what it says.”

“There,” said Ruth. “She got it.”

“‘Tiro’?” said Myrna. “What does it mean?”

“Those markings?” Ruth pointed Rosa at the painting. “They’re not code. They’re shorthand. Almost no one uses it anymore. Technology has killed it.”

“Video killed the radio star,” Clara said to Gabri.

“The Buggles,” he agreed.

“So what’s Tiro?” asked Robert.

“Tironian notes?” Ruth looked from face to face, skipping by Gabri. “He was Cicero’s secretary?” Again, she looked at them. “Anything? Nothing?”

“Cicero?” said Jean-Guy. “My mother bakes with that.”

“That’s Crisco, numbnuts.”

“Got it,” said Reine-Marie, who’d looked up Tiro on her phone. “He was Cicero’s secretary.”

“I just said that,” said Ruth.

“Part of his job was to write down all of Cicero’s speeches when he spoke in the Roman senate or elsewhere,” Reine-Marie said. “And to take notes at meetings. But Tiro had trouble keeping up, so he invented—”

“Shorthand,” declared Ruth. “It’s all over the damned painting—”

“And the elephant,” said Gabri.

“Holy shit. Sorry,” Jean-Guy said to Robert.

“No need. I’m beginning to agree with you.”

“Do you read shorthand, Ruth?” Armand asked.

“A bit. I worked as a personal assistant for a while.”

“To Cicero,” mumbled Gabri, while the rest of them spent a beat imagining Ruth assisting anyone in anything. Though that could explain the fall of the Roman republic.

“I was trained in Gregg shorthand, this looks like Pitman. Or a combination of the two.”

Armand stepped away and placed a call to Jérôme Brunel.

The code breaker was deeply embarrassed. “I can’t believe I missed that. One of the dangers in what we do. We’re looking for the obscure, expecting it. But if something is simple, we can miss it. We see the forest, but not the trees.”

“Do you know shorthand? Can you translate it?”