'Bill de Blasio Sex Tape!' - Vanity Fair new cover

Does Vanity Fair magazine know something juicy about Mayor de Blasio that nobody else does?

Cryptic text on the cover of the latest issue of the pop culture monthly suggests it might.

The cover of the January 2015 edition shows a dapper Bradley Cooper holding a cue stick in front of a billiards table that has three red balls and a cue ball. But in the lower left corner, one of the red cue balls, only half of which actually displayed, reads: "ill lasio ex ape!"

By itself, the words are meaningless. If one adds a few letters, however — a "B" before the first word, a "de B" in front of the second, and an "S" and a "T" in front of the third and fourth words, respectively, the phrase takes on a whole new, spectacular meaning:

"Bill de Blasio Sex Tape!"

The bizarre partial text immediately set into motion a bevy of online chatter that had media types and gossips wondering. The New York Times and Gawker both published stories on the unusual cover, while social media users also piped in.

But representatives from the mayor's office, as well as the magazine, both appeared to acknowledge Wednesday that the cover was just meant to poke fun at a public ever-hungry for scandal.

"Bill de Blasio Spandex Cape? Great idea for Halloween next year!" a de Blasio spokesperson said, imagining another possible iteration of the text, in a statement credited to New York First Lady Chirlane McCray.

Vanity Fair, meanwhile, teasingly shifted the blame to another celebrity — one who actually has a sex tape.

"That's what you get for letting Kim Kardashian guest edit the cover lines," a spokeswoman for the magazine told The Times.

The magazine issue makes no other mention of the text on the cover, or of the possibility of the existence of a mayoral sex tape and simply appears to be one in a series of tongue-in-cheek covers.

The cover of the magazine's latest UK edition, for example, is fashioned similarly, but the text on the cue ball in the lower left reads: "nry rter ex ape!"

Henry Porter, whose name could be made with those letters, is the London editor of Vanity Fair.