“You wouldn’t know how prehistoric?” I asked. For some reason, the number 30,000 popped into my head.
Delany considered. “No, I didn’t pay that much attention, and the book came right off the open shelves upstairs, so we have no record of which book it was.” She shook her head, frowned. “You folks sure it was him—that the body was Stefan’s? He was such a nice man, so…gentle.”
“We don’t have much on medical file for Mr. Antonescu, so we can’t be 100 percent sure. But, unofficially, yeah, it’s certainly a possibility we’re looking at.” The truth was that we had nothing on file for Stefan Antonescu—and NYU’s employment records were no help. The man had existed, apparently—that was a fact. But other than his height, weight, hair and eye color—the contents of the photo ID the university kept in their records office—nothing was on file about him. Amazing how often employment records were like that, when you dug below the surface.
Delany of course had no idea about the carbon-dating of the corpse—she’d have politely escorted me out of her office and called Bellevue if I’d told her it was thirty millennia old and I was even remotely considering the possibility that it could be Antonescu. It had been found in a corner of the men’s room early in the morning by some temp on the maintenance staff, one Hassan Saleen, who barely spoke a word of English, but knew enough to call 911. Our people had gotten the body out of the library before anyone else had seen it. And Hassan, however much he might have been shaken by finding a dead caveman in the corner, simply hadn’t the language to talk about it.
“One other thing.” I showed her a picture of the blue hanky. “Does that look familiar?”
“Yes.” Her eyes dilated. “Stefan always wears one like that in his pocket. I used to kid him about it: ‘You’re a janitor, but your hankies are better than most professors’.’ And he’d smile and say, ‘today’s janitor is tomorrow’s archaeologist—we both make our living with garbage.’”
I smiled. “Sounds like he had a head on his shoulders. Anything more you can tell me about him? Names of professors, students, who might have known him?”
She passed a piece of paper over to me. “I thought you might want that, so I put this together for you. Eight names on this list—five students, three profs. But they probably know even less about Stefan Antonescu than I do,” she said.
I thanked her, gave her my obligatory card and reminder to call if she thought of anything else, and left.
It was pushing past four-thirty, and Jenna would be back from England already from her bi-yearly conference at the London School of Economics, so I called in to the office that I’d be heading straight home. So far the only thing that seemed to connect in this case was that even before Antonescu died—if by some insane set of circumstances he was indeed the prehistoric corpse—he didn’t seem to have much of a life. He seemed a man not only out of time, but place.
The most likely explanation was that they were probably two different people after all, either with no connection, or, who knows, maybe Antonescu had been involved in some sort of relic-smuggling operation that had gone sour, and had dropped his handkerchief on one of the mummies. Lots of stuff going on like that in the post-Communist world. And powder from ground-up mummies had been used for thousands of years to make aphrodisiacs, some odd part of my brain remembered. But so far no prehistoric graves from anywhere had been reported robbed, no museums had reported any specimens missing… And Dave’s preliminary findings said that the corpse had been alive just a few days ago… Well, we all needed to look into this more carefully…
Jenna’s bags were right inside the door. “Honey?” I called out softly, and walked into the bedroom. She was sleeping. She needed the rest—it was nearly eleven already, British time. I started walking out quietly—
“Hey you. Don’t I get a welcome-home kiss?”
I turned around and smiled. Jenna was propped up on one arm. I walked quickly back to the bed, knelt down, and gave her a long, slow kiss…
“Mmmmm…” she said. “So how was your day today?”
“Good.” I brushed her lips with my finger. “A wild case cropped up yesterday, I’ll tell you about it over dinner—if you’re hungry.”
“I’m ravenous. I’ve been yearning for calamari all day.”
“San Martino’s?”
“Perfect,” Jenna said, and slid out of bed. All she had on were light blue panties. I watched them walk out of the room, and wondered whether we should be ruled by our stomachs or…
“I’m just gonna jump in the shower for a second,” she said.
The curtains swished closed and water began pouring.
I sat down in my favorite plump chair, and picked up a newspaper—yesterday’s Times, of London.
I stopped at the small headline on page five: “Neanderthal Mummy Pops Up at LSE.”
WHY WAS I not surprised that the mummy found under a table three evenings ago in the cafeteria of the London School of Economics apparently looked the same as mine? You get a sixth sense in this business—my “sick” sense.
I tracked down Mallory at Scotland Yard by phone early next morning.
“Hmmm…” Mallory said, when I’d explained the reason for my call. His full name was Michael G. B. Mallory, and he always sounded like a mixture of Michael Caine, in his Harry Palmer role, and Michael Rennie, in that 1950s science fiction movie.
“So,” I prodded. “Anything more you can tell me about your Neanderthal? Could he possibly have the same, ah, possible vintage as mine?”
Long pause.
“Michael?”
“Yes,” Mallory cleared his throat, and coughed. “I’d imagine he very well could.”
“Is that British for ‘he does’?”
“Philip,” Mallory cleared his throat again. “I was instructed to keep this under wraps. It’s sheer damned coincidence that some reporter at the Times picked it up, and your friend Jenna brought home that paper.”
“And your people are conducting an investigation into this? And that’s why you can’t talk about it?”
“Right,” Mallory replied.
“And you think I’m just going to take that for an answer, and forget we ever had this conversation?” I asked. “We’ve known each other for how long now—ten years on and off? You ever know me just to take no for an answer?”
Mallory sighed. “Max Soros was a porter at the LSE. Worked there for the past twenty-nine years. Prior to that he worked in the kitchen at Wright’s—”
“The hole-in-the-wall coffee shop right outside the LSE?”
“Right,” Mallory said. “It’s neither a hole-in-the-wall nor a coffee shop—it’s a restaurant—but Max worked there. For many years, apparently. And prior to that, we think he was a fixture at the British Museum. We have a description of a Max Soros reading, right near the desk used by Karl Marx, in 1907—”
“Just a second. How exactly old was this character?”
“As you said. Our carbon dating fixed the corpse at about thirty thousand years.”
“No,” I said. “I meant—how far back have you traced Max as a…living person?”
“At this point, back to the nineteenth century,” Mallory replied.
“Jeez,” I said.
“Precisely,” Mallory said.
“You have records for no other person named Max Soros? Sounds like a reasonably common Central European name.”
“Hungarian,” Mallory said. “The name’s Hungarian. The only other Max Soros that Inland Revenue has on file is thirty-two, and he’s gone visiting relations in Budapest right now. That’s far too young to be our missing person, let alone the mummy.”
“Jeez,” I said again, “nineteenth century… Well, I can certainly see why you’d want to keep the public out of this—your guy’s even stranger than mine.”
“I’m glad you understand,” Mallory said. “And there’s one thing more.”
“Yes?”
“Max Soros isn’t the only one,” Mallory said. “Another heavy-brow
ed gent turned up dead in Toronto last week. So your man in New York City makes the third.”
“Goddamn glut of Neanderthal mummies,” I muttered.
“Quite,” Mallory agreed.
“And all seem naturally mummified—like the bog people in the peat—rather than treated with chemicals like the ancient Egyptians.”
“Right,” Mallory again agreed.
“And you weren’t going to tell me about this? Knowing that I had information about a third incidence?”
Mallory’s voice lightened. “I never said I wouldn’t tell you. I was merely explaining to you why someone in my position would be reticent to blurt out this story. You jumped to conclusions. That’s a key difference between you Yanks and us.”
“Quite,” I said. “So now that we’ve got that out of the way, I assume you’ll tell me everything you know about your corpse and the guy in Toronto, in return for my continued full cooperation in the case of Stefan Antonescu.”
I BIT INTO an ebi sushi and savored the flavor. Sweeter than candy, cold rush of protein… I’d once been strictly a Neapolitan man, thought if I’d wanted raw fish and seaweed, I could stretch out with my mouth open on a beach somewhere, but now I ate sushi, sashimi—chirashi was my favorite—every chance I got.
“Assuming the corpses and the missing aren’t different sets of people, only two possible kinds of explanations I can think of,” I said to Jenna, who was working on a crisp piece of akagai—red clam, raw. “One, these guys time-travelled from thirty thousand years ago to our present, or to the past hundred or so years. Two, they somehow managed to actually stay alive for thirty thousand years. I suppose the second has the obvious explanation of why they would turn up dead—I mean, jeez, talk about dying of old age…”
Jenna’s green eyes smiled. I still found them enchanting. I especially liked seeing her like this, at this table, our table, at the Taste of Tokyo in the Village, where we’d first munched sushi and gotten to know each other more than three years ago. “Are we sure they’re real—you know, not just some clever concoction of old and new bones, like a Piltdown scam?” Jenna asked.
“No, Dave would’ve spotted that right away,” I replied. “He’s sure the body is all one person, thirty thousand years old, died just last week. And Toronto says the same about theirs.”
“And you don’t go for scams as the likely explanation anyway—you like your entropy more exotic,” Jenna said, smiling now with her lips as well.
I smiled back. “Scams are usually the more likely. But, right, the exotic evils are more alluring…”
“But you don’t like time travel either,” Jenna said.
I sucked in another shrimp, this one not as sweet. “Let’s just say I’ve never seen an actual example of it—I’m not even sure I believe it’s possible.”
“Of course, time travel wouldn’t be consistent with a thirty-thousand-year half-life decay,” Jenna said. “I mean, the usual expectation is someone steps into a time machine or portal and emerges on the other side having not actually aged a minute.”
“Well, the point is, there is no usual expectation in time travel because we have no actual cases of it,” I said. “For all we know, half-life decay does take place in the time traveller, but at an instantaneous pace. Anyway, that’s why I don’t want to get into time travel on this thing—no point trying to solve a puzzle by bringing in an insanely more complicated one.”
“How about cryogenics? That wouldn’t freeze the half-life clock, would it?”
“Hard to say,” I replied. “The clock starts ticking when the organism dies, and stops accumulating carbon-14—that’s when the decay begins. Could be that some kind of quick flash freezing short of death would stop the carbon intake, or maybe not.”
Jenna nodded. “All right, so that leaves accidental cryogenics as still a possibility here—the gentlemen were frozen alive thirty thousand years ago—then thawed out, accidentally or not, and revived a hundred or so years ago, and now their age suddenly caught up with them. And there’s also just the straight octogenarian explanation. The goal of some alchemy was immortality—the Chinese kind, not the European variety, which was just trying to make a quick buck, gold from lead.”
“But as far as we know the Chinese failed,” I said. “And that kind of immortality wouldn’t account for the carbon-14 dating, unless the alchemy somehow also caused the isotope to decay. I don’t know…” I put a dab of Japanese mustard on the tip of my tongue, and applied it to the roof of my mouth. It was supposed to clear not only the palate but the mind. “The most likely explanation is someone screwed up the tests somewhere.”
TESA STEWART WAS a Professor of Anthropology at New York University—sixty-year-old lady, sharp as a whip, who knew more about Neanderthals than anyone else I knew on a first-name basis in this town. The fact that she had taught at NYU for two decades, and might have known Stefan Antonescu, or something about him, had also figured in my decision to bring her into this case—the profs and students on Ruth Delany’s list had been no help at all. But Tesa and Antonescu had proved to be a dead-end too. She had no idea who he was, not even a recollection of seeing him in Bobst Library.
“You don’t mind walking in the mist, do you?” she asked. A light April rain had come on as we ambled around Washington Square Park.
“Not at all,” I replied. “I actually love the rain—to me it’s more tangible, more real, than sunshine.”
“I never knew that about you, Phil,” she said, and wrapped her arm around mine. “I like a man who likes the rain.”
I patted her hand. “I wonder how Neanderthals liked the rain.”
She smiled. “Well, seeing as how the DNA profiles in all three corpses seem pretty much in the Homo sapiens sapiens range—not much different from yours and mine—I guess they had as much likelihood of liking the rain as you or I or anyone else these days.”
“You think that, despite what they look like, the corpses aren’t Neanderthal?”
“Well, that’s one reasonable conclusion from the data suite,” Tesa said. “Another is that is the corpses are indeed Neanderthal, but Neanderthal DNA turns out to be the same as ours—that would be a revolutionary finding indeed. A third possibility—frustrating, but always a threat in these situations—is that the current state of our DNA analysis just isn’t up to tagging whatever it is in the genes that makes a Neanderthal a Neanderthal. In any case, preliminary profiles of the nucleotides you gave me from the three corpses differ from average Homo sapiens sapiens DNA in a range of 6 to 9 positions. Paabo’s Neanderthal DNA differs from ours in twenty-seven positions; human populations themselves usually vary in seven positions.”
I frowned. “And of course Paabo’s data is itself not completely accepted.”
“Exactly,” Tesa said. “He took extraordinary precautions to make sure his Neanderthal DNA wasn’t contaminated by ours—that’s what usually messes up the data in these studies—but even so… His mitochondrial strand came from a bone at least thirty-thousand-years old, found in Germany in 1856. All kinds of time for all kinds of contamination—human and otherwise—before and after the bone was discovered.”
“Interesting, though, that our corpses chime in at thirty thousand years too.” I shook my head. “Dave Spencer told me today that the carbon dating was the only thing keeping him from closing this case—and it’s now been corroborated in re-tests in two separate labs. Without that thirty-thousand-year reading, we just have a guy who looks like a mummified Neanderthal, with genes the same as ours, dying of apparently natural causes. Lots of strange looking people in this city—on this planet. Hell, I’m sure I look strange to some people.”
“Well, you could let your hair grow a little longer.” Tesa squeezed my shoulder. “Nice shirt, though. Silk?”
“Nah, just polyester washed so often it feels like silk.”
Tesa chuckled. “I was going over the Canadian profiles this morning. They found a few moth sequences among the Homo sapiens sapiens DNA in their corpse.”<
br />
“Moth?”
“Yes,” Tesa said. “Bombyx mori. Its larva is the most widely raised silkworm around the world. Easy to see how the contamination could’ve occurred. Lab guy was making love to his wife in her satin pajamas last night, didn’t wash his hands, or he helped tie his son’s silk tie for assembly this morning, who knows. Like I said, contamination is the main culprit in this business. But hey, I don’t have to tell you that—you run into it all the time with your forensic analyses, right?”
“My guy had an interest in silk,” I said.
“Stefan Antonescu?”
“Yeah—”
“Mom! Enjoying the Spring weather I see!” A woman with curly red hair, in her late twenties, joined us. She was a more vibrant version of Tesa, which was saying a lot.
“Debbie, oh God, I forgot completely about our lunch today!” Tesa said.
“It’s OK,” Debbie said, and smiled at both of us. “You look familiar…” she said to me.
“Oh, I’m forgetting my manners too,” Tesa said. “Dr. Phil D’Amato, forensics, NYPD, this is Debbie Tucker, my daughter. She may have seen you on your cable show, and you may have seen some of her science reporting in The New York Times.”
“Yes, I have,” I said and extended my hand. “You had a good piece on the Amish—”
My new phone rang in my jacket pocket. “Excuse me.” I turned away and pulled out the phone.
“Phil old man, sorry to ring you up like this on the cellular phone. Damned expensive, I know.” It was Michael Mallory.
“That’s OK,” I said. “What’s up?” A stray raindrop bounced off the phone into my mouth.
“Well, I just rang off Gerry’s assistant in Toronto. Bad news, I’m afraid—Gerry died of a heart attack this afternoon. I know you don’t like coincidences…”
“No, I don’t,” I said. Gerry Moses was my counterpart in Toronto.
“He was doing some investigating down near your neck of the woods,” Mallory continued, “in Chautauqua, south of Buffalo—”
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