The Silk Code

by Paul Levinson

  Good ol’ lay-back Jack, proffering a little California philosophy with a New York accent…

  “Yep, you’re right,” I said, “So what have you got for me.”

  “Well, I just got off the phone with Herby—you really should call and apologize to him. That blue hanky turned up after all. The box had been misplaced, just as I’d guessed, by one of Dave Spencer’s people whom Herby had let go. I’m not saying it was deliberate. But like I say, these things happen. So now, if you call up Herby and apologize for questioning his professionalism, I’m sure he’d be happy to give you the hanky if you went down to his office. We’re all on the same side here—fighting the bad guys. Let’s not fight amongst ourselves, Phil!”

  “You’re right, Jack—that’s good advice. I’ll take it—and thank you!”

  I clicked off the phone, and handed it back to Jenna.

  “Good advice?”

  “Fuck the advice—Herby found the hanky,” I said.

  “Great! What are you going to do with it?”

  “I’ll send it over to Mary Radcliff, and see if she can really reverse engineer it into a set of punch cards. Then we’ll send the cards over to my people at MIT, and see if they can wring any language, any message, out of the code in the cards.”

  “But how can we be sure that this hanky is even the original Dave found on the corpse?” Jenna asked. “I mean, if it was missing at all, then doesn’t that contaminate the chain of evidence?”

  I smiled. “Yeah, it does—but this isn’t a court of law. We’re not looking at the handkerchief for evidence in that sense. We’re just trying to see if it might be able to tell us something. But here’s what I’ll do, anyway—I’ll buy two other blue handkerchiefs, that look as much as possible like the original, and send all three over to Mary. I of course won’t tell her which is which. If she gets the same punch cards out of all three, then that means the handkerchiefs are meaningless. But if she gets something different from the Neanderthal hanky—well, then, that’ll at least be something.”

  Jenna considered. “That wouldn’t protect against a false message, though—say, if someone had deliberately replaced the original hanky.”

  “No, it wouldn’t,” I agreed. “The only way we can check on that score is to see what kinds of messages we get from the other sources—like the Tocharians.”

  I WAS AT Bonnie’s office two hours later. My news was bad. “Pedro Sanches is dead.”

  “Oh no!” Bonnie cried.

  “Look, I’m not going to lie to you,” I said. “I think we’re in some sort of race here, some kind of contest, with whatever or whoever it is who is doing this. And part of the race seems to be their killing, or trying to kill, anyone who seems to be getting too close to understanding what’s going on. Now no one other than Jenna, Mallory in England, maybe one or two of his associates, and I know that you’ve been working on these Tocharian manuscripts—sort of second hand, from what first we and then Pedro sent directly over to you—right?”

  Bonnie nodded. I could see she was frightened, and I felt terrible about it.

  “I can’t guarantee that no one else knows—that they’re not on to you already—but I can guarantee that I won’t tell another soul, and won’t even discuss this with you ever again, won’t come to see you again, if you decide you want to end this right now. And frankly, I wouldn’t blame you in the slightest. But I also need to tell you that we could really use your help now—you’re the only one we can turn to now at this late stage about those manuscripts—if you’re willing to take the risk.”

  Bonnie nodded again. “I understand,” she said.

  I looked around her tiny office at Columbia. Assistant professors, someone once had told me, rated one step better than bathrooms when it came to office space…

  “This is the most exciting thing I’ve ever worked on,” she said. “I’ve always had a dual specialty—early Indo-European Celtic, and Basque. I’ve been trying to find some similarity—actually, any similarity—for years.”

  “With no success?” I knew something about Basque, and knew it seemed to have no connection whatsoever to any Indo-European language.

  “No, none,” Bonnie said. “Every lead I tracked down—archaeo-linguists are like detectives in that way—every similarity I could find always turned out to be contamination from a more recent source. You know, the Romans occupied some Basque territory, so Latin crept in—”

  “Yeah,” I said. “But you see some connection now between Basque and the Tocharian?”

  “No, not linguistically—but reference-wise.”

  “I don’t get it,” I said.

  “Well, the language of the manuscripts is thoroughly Tocharian—an early Indo-European language, just like what we’d expect. And, of course, they were found in the Tarim Basin. But there seem to be some references in them to places on the extreme west coast, right against the sea, with mountains to the back, and some of the names look like they might be Basque.”

  “Hmmm…this was in the magical part of the texts?”

  “Yes,” Bonnie replied. “Those are the ones we’re trying to get new translations for. The monastery stuff and commercial ledgers are all cut and dried. Poor Pedro…” she caught herself in a sob.

  “It’s OK,” I said. “I feel like crying about it too.”

  “You’re a nice man,” she said. “I can see why Jenna and you—”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “I want to keep working on this,” she said.

  “I know,” I said. “I’m glad. Just…please, please be careful.” As if being careful would do any good! my conscience screamed at me.

  “OK,” Bonnie said, and smiled.

  “One other thing—you mentioned something about a ‘reversal,’ on the phone machine yesterday. But I didn’t quite understand it…”

  “Yes,” Bonnie said. “I sent some e-mail to Pedro about that. There is some ambiguity in the Tocharian wording which could be coincidence, or maybe not. All languages have it—you know, victim and victor mean the opposite, but if someone didn’t fully understand English, and had a sample of our writing that was partially obliterated, they might get the wrong message—and think that the victim in an account was really the victor… See what I’m saying?”

  “Yeah, sort of,” I said. “Don’t they have the same Latin root?”

  “Well, it’s tricky,” Bonnie said. “Victim comes from vincio, to bind, and victor comes from vinco, to conquer or vanquish. With just that one ‘i’ difference in the words there could be an overlap—maybe both were the same in some very early Latin. But my point is they went on to mean two opposite things—the conquered and the conqueror—in English, and someone who didn’t know English with precision, let alone Latin, could render a not unreasonable, but completely wrong, interpretation of either victim or victor. Or, for that matter, conquered or conqueror. It’s a very common phenomenon in language—that’s the problem. Here, let me hunt down the Tocharian…”

  “No, not now. Let’s just concentrate on getting the best possible complete translation of all the relevant manuscripts in the fastest possible time. We can consider specific problem areas, and alternate interpretations, when we get that far.”

  “OK.”

  “Good,” I said. “What did Pedro think of your reversal theory, though?”

  She sobbed again. “I just got my e-mail returned with that automatic advisory that they had tried to deliver it for two days, and were giving up.”

  I WAS BACK in my office the next day. It felt good to be at my desk again. Not that anything was solved, but it felt good anyway. I sometimes thought I could use more days like this—just coming into my office, tracking down leads, like any normal forensic detective. Except I was so accustomed to abnormality, I’d probably die of boredom.

  Which was it better to die of: (a) boredom, (b) weirdo Neanderthal virus, (c) knife, like Tesa Stewart, or (d) homicidally induced asthma, like Pedro Sanches? Mallory had said the poor guy didn’t show so much a
s a single asthmatic reaction on any hospital record anywhere in the UK for as long as they had been keeping records like that over there, and with their nationalized health insurance they’d been keeping those kinds of records very carefully and for a very long time. No way Pedro hadn’t been murdered.

  Answer: (e) none of the above—better not to die at all, goddamnit.

  I had round-the-clock protection on Jenna and Bonnie—not that it made me comfortable about them, but it was better than nothing. And Mallory had a plan to throw them off the track of what Mary Radcliff was trying to do. “Them”—I didn’t think any one of us was the least bit safe from “them.”

  “This is for you, Phil.” Megan, a bright young face who had just started in the Department, gave me a DHL package.

  “Thanks.” It was a videotape from Mallory.

  I toyed with the idea of watching it in the office, but decided to take it home. “I’ll be back in a few hours,” I said to Megan.

  A patrol car was right outside our brownstone, keeping an eye on Jenna, just where it was supposed to be. Good.

  I put the tape in the machine, and sat down with Jenna to watch it.

  “Next on The BBC at 10: ‘A Special Report’: ‘The Silken Secret’—and an interview with Mrs. Mary Radcliff, of the Silk Museum in Macclesfield.”

  “Good evening,” Amanda said. She brushed back her hair and looked sensuously, seriously into the camera. She was standing in front of the Silk Museum, with Mary Radcliff at her side. “Silk has long held a special fascination for man—and woman,” Amanda continued. “Here at the Silk Museum at the Heritage Center in Macclesfield, the splendid Jacquard Looms of bygone days still glint beguilingly in the moonlight.”

  The scene dissolved to an aerial shot of a glass ceiling, and then moved in slowly through the glass to rows of Jacquard Looms within, closer and closer, until a single a Jacquard Loom filled the screen.

  “Those looms worked on punched paper cards—nearly two centuries before cards like that were employed by our first computers,” Amanda’s voice went on. “They produced so much of beauty. Tonight we consider a new mystery: might those same cards have served an additional purpose—conveying messages in their punchings from Victorian and earlier times?

  “We are joined tonight by Mrs. Mary Radcliff, one of the leading historians and experts at the Museum. Mrs. Radcliff will be our guide as we plumb the silken secrets.”

  Mysterious music played in the background.

  I chuckled. “Bring on Robert Stack.”

  “Shhh…” Jenna said.

  Amanda and Mary Radcliff were back on the screen. “Mrs. Radcliff,” Amanda said, “is it really possible that silk garments could hold hidden messages? Isn’t this just like the Paul-is-dead brouhaha of the 1960s? Play a recording backwards, or at a different speed, and you suddenly hear ‘turn me on dead man,’ or such like?”

  “There’s of course always the danger that what we see in our artifacts is of our making, rather than the people who created the work,” Mary said. “But that does not mean that there cannot be a hidden message in a recording, or a word in silk—both are, after all, the result of human creation. And humans send messages, do they not?”

  The music faded…

  “Of course we do,” Amanda said. “But tell me then, how exactly might a message be embedded in a silk weave?”

  Mary held up a blue silk handkerchief. “If this handkerchief was made on a loom which used punch cards, then we might be able, in principle, to reconstruct the punch cards by examination of the handkerchief.” Mary put down the hanky and held up a bunch of punch cards.

  “OK,” Amanda said. “I’m with you so far. But how would we get from the punch cards to a secret message?”

  “Ah, that’s the interesting part,” Mary said. “Scientists at MIT supply a different letter for each set of punches. They do this over and over again, each time changing the letters assigned to the punches. And they feed this all into a computer, which puts the letters together for each group of assignments, and sees if any add up to words or sentences.”

  “Fascinating,” Amanda said. “But how can you know that each of the punch configurations represents a letter, or series of letters? Maybe they each represent an entire word?”

  “Yes, that’s possible,” Mary said. “I’d imagine the scientists at MIT checked for that too.”

  “So you have already forwarded these cards to the people at MIT, and they have already done their work?”

  “Yes, we forwarded the cards. The people at MIT are checking the punch configurations right now.”

  “And you were therefore able to retrieve a series of punch cards from that handkerchief?” Amanda asked.

  “Oh yes,” Mary said. “That part was easier than we expected.”

  “Could you tell anything about the message just by looking at the punch cards?” Amanda asked.

  “No, not really,” Mary said. “They are essentially meaningless until the letter substitutions are made.”

  “And what do you expect the MIT people might find there?”

  “I really couldn’t say,” Mary said. “The New York City Police Department forwarded that silk handkerchief to us to see if we could reconstruct the cards. We did that. The handkerchief, as you know, was apparently found on a corpse of a Neanderthal—”

  “Did Neanderthals have looms?”

  “Well, I suppose that’s possible,” Mary said. “But we won’t know until we hear from the scientists at MIT. It’s out of our hands now…”

  “Mary was fabulous!” Jenna said, as the credits ran over a closing shot of the Museum. “She puts you to shame when it comes to dissembling.”

  “Thanks.” I smiled. “There are few liars as effective as little old ladies.”

  “So how far along is she actually with the cards?”

  “She’s not even sure, yet, that the Neanderthal hanky was created by a loom—certainly not a Jacquard, classic or current. But the Museum is tied into a whole worldwide network of silk specialists—they have silk museums in China, Japan, other places. Mary’s plan at present is to check with each of the museums, any place she can find that has any access to a card-punching silk loom, and see if the weave in the handkerchief correlates with any of those. Probably just running after rainbows. But at least her story that the project’s now in MIT’s hands will draw our killer away from her.”

  “I’m sure the MIT people are thrilled,” Jenna said.

  “Well, we didn’t give any names,” I said. “And I checked with my contacts there, and they said they had no problem with Mary mentioning MIT’s name in this broadcast. Truthfully, I don’t think they believe that there’s anything more than coincidence to all the deaths. But the killer really isn’t a threat to MIT anyway. What’s he going to do—murder every one in the university? And, in the meantime, it buys Mary some time.”

  “When does this show air?” Jenna asked.

  “Tomorrow night, London time,” I replied.

  “Let’s hope the killer’s still in England, and watches the BBC,” Jenna said.

  A BRITISH AIRLINES plane landed twenty minutes later at JFK.

  A man waited on line fifteen minutes after that, for Customs.

  “That’s very pretty, Mommy,” a little girl said to her mother, and pointed to an iridescent blue-green handkerchief sticking out of the man’s pocket.

  “Here, would you like it?” The man pulled the handkerchief out of his pocket. “I have many more like it—my company makes them—and this one is new and fresh. I haven’t used it.”

  The little girl smiled shyly, then slowly nodded.

  “No, I don’t think—” the mother began.

  “Please, Mommy?” the little girl pleaded.

  “Really, I assure you, it’s not expensive, and I haven’t used it at all, see?”

  “Please Mommy?”

  “Well, OK…” the mother relented. “But let me hold it for you until we get home.” She took the hanky from the man, and tha
nked him. That would give her time to talk her daughter out of wanting it, before they got home. A chocolate ice-cream cone with sprinkles should complete the job…

  They went to separate Customs lines; the man passed through with no problem.

  The dispatcher hailed a cab for him in the rain.

  “Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village,” the man instructed the cabbie. “How long has the weather been like this?”

  I CALLED RUTH Delany the next morning.

  “Phil—I know you were trying to get in touch with me. My sister’s family came over, the weather’s been gorgeous this past week—except for that downpour yesterday—and I couldn’t resist taking some time off with them. August is a slow time in the library anyway.”

  “Absolutely,” I said. “You had the right idea. I was really just wondering about Stefan…”

  “Oh, I thought you knew—I told him he should call you so you wouldn’t worry…”

  “Ah, I guess he forgot—or maybe he missed me because I was out of the country myself for the past few weeks—in England.”

  “Beautiful country.”

  “Yes, it is,” I said. “Anyway, about Stefan…”

  “Oh yes. He told me he had an urge to see the country—the heat and humidity were getting him down. He’s not a young man, you know.”

  Yeah, I knew. “And this was when—week before last?”

  “No, I think the week before that—three weeks ago,” Ruth said. “He’s been banking vacation time for years now, and truthfully, a memo came around earlier this month that said folks had to use some of their banked time by the end of the year, or else they’d lose it. I hate when they do that, don’t you?”

  “Yes, I do,” I said, truthfully.

  “So he said he was going to take a month off—just see the country, by Greyhound. He said they were having a sale—for seventy-nine dollars you could take a bus anywhere in the country, and get off as many times as you liked.”