The Silk Code

by Paul Levinson

  H.-T. Lum was explaining. He had just been about to call us, or fax us, or send a letter to us, with his own important news…“People heard about what happened to Dave Spencer—word travels quickly up here,” Lum said. “My guess is some tourist, maybe someone working for a museum in the States, bribed someone here and stole the body. A Neanderthal corpse in good condition could fetch a fortune!”

  “So you’re saying Gerry Moses turned ape-man on us too?” Mallory asked.

  “Why not?” Lum replied. “I don’t know for a fact that he did. But it happened to Dave Spencer.”

  “But you don’t have Gerry’s body,” I said.

  “No. As I said, it’s missing,” Lum replied.

  “Jesus H. Christ,” Mallory said. “And you’ve known this for how long? Two days? And you hadn’t thought to pick up a bloody phone and let us know? Good thing Phil thought to initiate this call.”

  “No need to be so angry!” Lum retorted, aggravated. “It was the weekend—some of us don’t work seven days a week. And I have misgivings about the phone anyway. You never know who’s listening in!”

  “Yet you’re talking on the phone right now,” Mallory said.

  “Yes, and maybe therefore I’m not saying everything I know!”

  “All right,” I said. “Let’s each of us take it easy. Let’s go over the current status of each of our corpses, so we’re all on the same wavelength.” I still preferred wavelength to page—a more dynamic metaphor. “H.-T., I assume your original Neanderthal mummy is still in evidence?”

  “Yes,” Lum said.

  “And the man you thought might be him—”

  “Sidney Eigen—”

  “Yeah, Sidney Eigen. He’s still missing?”

  “Yes,” Lum said.

  “Same on this side,” Mallory said. “Our mummy is still at home, and there’s no sign of Max Soros. Your Stefan Antonescu is the only one of the three who has come back to life—sorry, reappeared, actually, we never knew with a certainty he was a corpse. We still can’t say for sure with either Eigen or Soros. But your Stefan is clearly the odd man out on this, Phil. Either a cock-up in the New York theatre, if there’s some sort of master plan behind all of this, or, I don’t know…but Antonescu is in some way a key. Has he been any more forthcoming, Phil?”

  “No, not really.” Well, here I was lying on the phone a little after all. I still didn’t feel completely comfortable about Lum, and I had to do what I could to protect Stefan. He indeed was a crucial player.

  “You know, it seems to me that there may be two master plans—or at least, phenomena—at work here,” I continued. “One is this virus, or whatever is, that not only kills some people but turns them into Neanderthals and produces a false thirty-thousand-year carbon dating. About the only thing we know about that with any kind of confidence is that silk seems to be some sort of a cure, an antidote, a preventative, something along those lines.”

  “That’s what your Amish friends gave you?” Mallory asked.

  “Yes.”

  “The missus and I been sleeping in satin here too, just to be on the safe side,” Mallory said. “And we took the cure you sent along.”

  “And the second phenomenon?” Lum prompted. “The other factor to which you referred?”

  “Well, we don’t know if the two are related,” I said. “But there’s clearly some sort of knifist afoot. Gerry and Dave presumably died of the virus; I got sick from it, but received the Amish cure in time. But that doesn’t account for the guy who gave me a little engraving on my belly—duty free—in Heathrow airport.”

  “You’re still harping on that, Phil? It’s hardly a phenomenon—London, alas, has its share of vicious criminals roaming the streets, and no doubt, airports, too,” Mallory said.

  “True, but I’ve just been in contact with my Amish friends. I’d sent them a sketch I’d had worked up here of the guy who knifed me in Heathrow—it was the least I could do after they’d saved my life. I wanted them to be prepared. And you know what? Seems that same vicious criminal jumped on a plane and reached our side of the pond. He tried to knife one of my friends in Pennsylvania over coffee this morning.”

  “You’re back in Pennsylvania, Phil?” Mallory asked.

  “Actually, no—my friend called me.”

  “So your friend was OK?” Lum asked. “He was just wounded, like you, not killed?”

  “Yeah, he’s OK,” I said. “But from all accounts our man from Heathrow tried to kill him. Fortunately my friend was wearing a special shirt—‘safety weave,’ they call it—which wraps around the blade, blunts it, slows its motion, so it’s not much worse than a thumb jabbed into the stomach.”

  “So we come back to those unique Amish you have over there,” Mallory said. “Knife-proof vests, telephones—”

  “Well, there’s a lot of misunderstanding of the Amish,” I said. “Some of them don’t mind phones, as long as they’re not inside their homes.”

  Mallory laughed, dryly. “What’s the bleedin’ world coming to, eh? Amish use phones; the Centre for Forensic Sciences in Toronto refrains from using them—”

  “Not the whole Centre,” Lum protested. “I just find it advisable sometimes not to—,”

  “To each his own,” I said. “Anyway, the important thing is that my friends in Lancaster County have this bastard’s picture now, they know what he looks like, so they’ll see him coming if he should visit their area again.”

  “I take it, then, that you’ve ruled out the possibility that your friends in Pennsylvania are lying,” Mallory observed.

  “WHY ARE YOU so sure one of them’s lying?” Jenna asked, over the first sushi dinner we’d treated ourselves to in a long time. It was just yellow tail for me tonight—three rolls with vinegared rice and scallion. Yeah, I know there’s some ecological reason not to eat it—the fishermen kill other innocent species in the nets that they use to catch the yellowtail. Or maybe it was OK now. I frankly didn’t give a rat’s ass tonight. I figured I was doing enough for ecology already, running after this Neanderthal thing that seemed to be biting us all in the gluteus.

  I poured some green tea for Jenna and me. She was more adventurous—and environmentally sound—than I was this evening. She had just been brought a big plate of chirashi.

  “OK, let’s look at each of them,” I said. “Let’s start with H.-T. Lum. First, he seems weak, frightened, barely competent. Right away I’m suspicious: weak, incompetent people rarely rise to his position.”

  “Well, he didn’t exactly attain the job the usual way,” Jenna said. “Maybe he was good as second in command, but he’s weak as top dog.”

  “Nah, I don’t believe it,” I said. “I mean, I think that’s possible, of course. But usually seconds-in-command get even that far because they have something on the ball. Look at Herby Edelstein—some of the brass have been mumbling already that he’s better than Dave. Look at Theodore Roosevelt—at Anwar Sadat.”

  “OK,” Jenna said. “I agree from what you’ve said that Lum lays it on a little thick. And he’s likely more competent than he lets on. Let’s grant that he’s a very peculiar man. But maybe that’s just his way of dealing with crises—feign a certain amount of fear, even lack of competence, as a way of keeping everyone off-balance, to gain yourself a little space, and time. Not everyone works the same as you, you know—plunging straight ahead.” She smiled.

  “I’ll take that as a compliment, thanks.”

  “But what else do we have against him, other than his attitude?”

  I sniffed the hot green tea—nothing like its fragrance to clear your head.

  “We never seem to get anything from him,” I said. “And when we do, it’s always in a weird way. I don’t care how the hell he feels about phones. Who in his right mind would find Gerry Moses’ body missing, and wait two days to tell us about it? That’s an eternity in a case like this. Mallory was furious, and I don’t blame him.”

  “But Mallory’s been upfront with you about everything—as f
ar as you know—almost since the day all of this began,” Jenna said. “He sent us the fax with the Tocharian translation. Yet you’re doubting him too.”

  “How do we know the translation is accurate?” I said. “How do we know Mallory didn’t doctor it to tell us what he wants us to think?”

  “No problem,” Jenna said. “I have a friend in Linguistics at Columbia—Bonnie Mitcham—who can translate that. Mallory also faxed us the original.”

  “How do we know that’s the original?”

  “Well, you can question everything, and drive yourself crazy,” Jenna said. “I know you like to do this, but where does it really get you? It’s a game—like solipsism. We’ve talked about this before. If I want to believe the world is my dream, if I want to doubt that any stimulus, any evidence offered to the contrary, is real, well, then, no one could ever logically talk me out of my view.”

  “I have faith that you’re real, angel.”

  She mouthed a kiss to me. “Anyway, we could probably get another copy of the Tocharian original from someone other than Mallory… You know, everyone running around here, suspecting that the other one is lying, is just what someone who is really behind this would want—sit back and watch you tear yourselves to pieces.”

  “Yeah, if the virus doesn’t get us first.”

  “Are you making progress on that—”

  “Progress? I can’t even demonstrate to anyone’s satisfaction that there is a virus! Herby’s people have run every test known to humanity on poor Dave. There’s nothing there—other than the fact that he looks like a Neanderthal, and somehow became thirty thousand years old overnight.”

  “So it’s something that’s been unknown to humanity—or at least, its existence has been unknown, maybe not its effects, like you always say about viruses themselves before the nineteenth century, or even bacteria before Leeuwenhoek.”

  “And that’s precisely the problem,” I said. “Let’s say I somehow suspected that bacteria, not rats, not filth, not bad humors, were the ultimate cause of the Plague in the year 1400. Without a microscope to pinpoint Pasteurella pestis, how could I ever prove it? I’d have as much as three-quarters of the population dead in some locales as evidence—far more by a factor of God knows how many than our newly minted Neanderthals—but no way of investigating what I saw as its truest cause. Even after Leeuwenhoek, it took the human species a hundred and fifty more years to come up with a Pasteur.”

  “But if your hypotheses about bacteria and what they were like were to some extent accurate, you might be able to draw reasonable expectations that you could test about their impact even if you could never see them per se,” Jenna said. “You might hypothesize that, as living organisms, they would die in boiling water, or flames, and treat the site of plague victims that way, and get results…”

  I refilled Jenna’s cup with tea, and realized the pot was just about empty. I looked up for our waiter—usually waiters and waitresses have an uncanny knack of knowing just when to intrude on a sensitive conversation, and throw it off-track, if not when a teapot or a pitcher of sangria required replenishing. But no one who could help was in sight.

  I did see a couple at a table halfway across the room, who seemed to be looking in my direction, pointing to a menu on their table, then looking at me again, and whispering in exaggerated motions to one another.

  Jenna turned to see what I was looking at. “Looks like a newspaper,” she said.

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “I thought I was on their menu at first. I guess I was talking a little loudly.”

  Our waiter finally appeared. Jenna started telling him we needed more tea—

  “I’m off to the men’s room,” I said.

  I of course went by way of my audience’s table. The man stood up and offered his hand as I walked slowly by. “Dr. D’Amato? Sorry for staring at you before.”

  I took the hand and shook it. “Hey, I’m flattered,” I said. “Assuming the stare was out of admiration.” I smiled and gave his hand another pump.

  The woman reddened, and turned embarrassed eyes down to the paper.

  “Yes, well,” the man said, “have you seen tomorrow’s Times? Has a very flattering picture of you, but, well…”

  He gave me the paper—tomorrow’s edition indeed, open to the middle of the local section. There was a beaming picture of me, in my favorite vest and tie. In fact, the very vest I was wearing this evening. And the article…

  Its headline read: “New York Forensics on Neanderthal Wild Goose Chase.”

  The sub-headlines read: “Experts Deride Three Months of Work as ‘Pseudo-Science’—Commissioner’s Office to Investigate.”

  And it got worse from there.

  By this time, Jenna had joined us.

  “Unbelievable,” she said. “Why would Debbie write something like that?”

  I COULD STILL feel the yellowtail swimming around in my stomach in Jack Dugan’s office at 9 o’clock the next morning, somewhere under the tea and toast I’d dumped in there about an hour earlier.

  “Not to worry overly,” Jack said. “Believe me, the Commissioner’s far more pissed off at the Times than he is at you—he doesn’t like finding out from them that he’s launching an investigation.”

  Somehow I was still worried—not that it mattered, I was going to continue with my work on this whatever the hell the Department said.

  “I told him just this morning,” Herby Edelstein, who was also in the office, piped in. The ‘him’ was the Commissioner. “I saw Dave’s body, anyone could see there was something strange going on there. I told him I was behind you 100 percent on getting to the bottom of this. It’s just this virus thing—you know, we’ve got to keep a lid on that until we’re more sure. We don’t want the public panicking.”

  “Right,” Dugan said. “Like that idiotic Dustin Hoffman movie with the monkey.”

  “Outbreak,” I said. “That was the name of the movie. Except in that movie the public’s panic was justified… Look, I don’t know how Debbie got her information.” But I had a pretty good idea. I’d tried to call both Debbie Tucker and her mother, last night and this morning, but had no luck with either. Debbie’s obvious source was her mother, but I didn’t want to focus attention on Tesa until I had a better sense of what was going on.

  “Well, we’re on that,” Dugan said. “We’ve got some detectives over to Debbie Tucker’s apartment even as we speak. But the point is: her information about your theories and goings-about was accurate. So she got it from someone who knows.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “unlike those bozo ‘experts’ from NYU she interviewed about my Amish work. ‘They abjure technology—recognize it for the crippling detriment it is to humanity—and would never be involved in the kinds of schemes Dr. D’Amato imagines them to be’.”

  Dugan smiled. “Well, they’re profs from the Communications Department, right? Wha’d you expect?”

  I returned the smile, barely. “And what about her information about the Department’s investigation of my investigation—you know, the one the Commissioner was so furious to find out about in the paper? Was her information reliable about that too?” In other words, just because the Commissioner didn’t know about it, didn’t mean it wasn’t going on.

  Herby cleared his throat. “Phil, I’m sure Dave explained to you the ah, resistance, some of the folks at One Police Plaza have to your theories. I’d be lying to you if I told you there was no one in the upper echelons out gunning for you—”

  The phone rang.

  Dugan picked it up. “Yeah?… Jesus… Yeah, all right… Jesus—he’s right here… All right. Jesus. I’ll get him over there.”

  He hung up and looked at Herby. “Your presence is requested at Debbie Tucker’s apartment.”

  “What, there’s a body there?” Herby asked.

  “Yeah, two of them—presumably Debbie’s, and some older woman’s. One cut up pretty nicely. The other—we don’t know the cause of death yet—”

  I was halfway out of the
door—

  “You can come too,” Dugan called after me. “In fact, I think I’ll tag along and make it three’s a crowd…”

  They joined me at the elevator. Dugan straightened his uniform in the reflection of the smooth brass door.

  “We’ll get the son of a bitch who did this, don’t you worry, Phil,” Dugan said. “They said the apartment’s crawling with prints.”

  FOURTEEN

  “No sign of rape in either case,” Patricia Chu, Herby’s chief assistant, formerly Dave’s, informed us.

  Debbie was stretched out spread eagle on her bed, red scarf her only garb, knotted tightly around her neck. It just had to be silk—someone was trying to send a message. Bombyx mori, memento mori…

  “As you can see, no marks anywhere on the front of the body, and nothing I could see on preliminary on the back,” Patricia said. “Best guess at this point is strangulation. We’ll know more after the full examination.”

  “Better take a closer look at that too.” I pointed to some red fibers in the hair just above her pudenda. Red silk on red hair—color coordinated for death tied up in some way to some Neanderthal phenomenon.

  “Yeah, I noticed that,” Patricia said.

  “How long do you figure she’s been dead?” I asked.

  “I’d say about eight to ten hours. This happened in the middle of the night,” Patricia replied.

  Herby was busy with other body, stabbed to death in the foyer, dragged into the bathroom.

  Tesa’s clothes all seemed to be on, except for the four or five parts of her blouse that had been rent open with the knife. No signs of silk that I could see.

  “I only met her once—that day at Dave’s exhumation,” Herby said. “She seemed like a fine lady.”

  “She was,” I said.

  “Someone must’ve been pretty angry at her,” Herby said.

  “She must’ve come in on the strangulation,” Dugan, who had joined us, said. “Or right after.”