“Sears,” Jenna said.
“Ah, yes,” Amanda said. “But you of course knew that—the two Taiwanese hankies, if that’s what they are, were controls.”
“Exactly,” I said. “We had to do that because—”
“No need to explain. We understand—and approve—completely. Now, the third hanky, that’s where the story is. Mary says it’s definitely early to middle Victorian—nothing prehistoric, of course, they didn’t have Jacquard Looms then, as far as we know. But 1850 looks to be its time, and that fits perfectly with Jacquard use, certainly here and on the continent. And Mary back-worked a set of cards for them, and faxed their image to MIT. They didn’t need the actual cards, of course, just their pattern—”
“Right,” I said again.
“And the code proved very easy to crack. And they got one clear word out of it—”
“Yes?”
“Mitxeleta,” Amanda said.
“What was that?” I asked.
“Mitxeleta,” Amanda repeated. “The MIT people did a massive search in all online dictionaries. Mitxeleta is Basque for butterfly…”
A DEFTLY AIMED winged living dart flew silently through an open window.
A tea kettle whistled.
Jenna jerked, involuntarily, toward the kitchen.
And the dart sailed clean through an inch of baggy fabric around her thigh, never touching skin. It lodged in an area-rug close to a far wall, taking its woolen composition as an environment suitable for its complete biodegrading, which it promptly did.
A finger would find a hole in the slacks later that week. It would be blamed on a moth…
“HOLD ON A second, teapot’s whistling,” Jenna said.
“I could use a cup myself,” Amanda said.
“Me too,” I said.
“I wish I could send each of you a cup through the phone,” Jenna said.
“Oh, one other thing,” Amanda said.
“Yes?” I said.
“One of the fellows at MIT is working on some sort of digital music project—you know, the kind that reads computer code and turns it into music?”
“Right,” I said. “A digital synthesizer. All kinds of stuff like that going on at MIT these days.”
“Yeah,” Amanda said. “And this fellow ran the hanky code through the synthesizer just to see how it would play—he does that with all the code he gets his hands on, almost a hobby with him. And he said the ‘Mitxeleta’ code produced the most beautiful flute music he had ever heard—”
The call-waiting beeped on my phone. I asked Amanda and Jenna to hold on a second, and took the other call.
It was Ruth Delany. “We found a record player here,” she said.
“Anything unusual on the record?”
“Well, I’m not sure…there’s a very enchanting flute…”
“I’ll be right over,” I said.
THE MUSIC ON the 78 recording was the strangest concoction of sounds I’d ever heard. Flutes, klezmer, moaning, chanting, pleading in languages I couldn’t understand…made Stravinsky and Cage and rap all seem like the sweetest symphony in comparison…and yet it was captivatingly melodic too…
“See what I mean? It’s like, Stefan’s record is trying to tell us something,” Ruth said.
“Yeah, but what?” I did have the feeling that, if I could just let myself go, let myself be totally swept up in the music, it would indeed tell me something, something so crucially, fundamentally important, that it couldn’t be expressed in just words…
But I couldn’t let myself go like that. I didn’t know how. Maybe with time… I kept listening… I saw images of silk, the sounds of silk, images of the music of the flute, not the flute…sweet flying synesthesia…
I wondered what Stefan had made of this… I wondered what Amanda might hear… Amos—
I heard a sound that was wrong for this…that didn’t belong…clashing—
“Dr. D’Amato? Phil!” Ruth was talking to me. She’d pulled the needle off of the speedy old record—
“Yeah.”
“I think your little phone’s ringing again,” she said. “You sure get lots of action on that!”
“Ah yes, thanks.” I took the call.
“Phil? I’m sorry to call on this number—”
“That’s OK, Bonnie. Just hold on a minute.” I put her on hold.
“That recording is really something,” I said to Ruth. “Had me practically mesmerized.”
“Me too, the first few times,” Ruth said. “I think I’m learning how to deal with it.”
“Good,” I said. “Look, I’ve got to take this call now. But that recording may have something important for us—a message—I don’t know. Is there some way you could make a copy of it? A digital recording or even a cassette? It’s too fragile for me to just lug around right now—those 78s fall apart if you even just look at them the wrong way.”
Ruth nodded. “No problem, Doctor. I’ll have one of our computer people take a look at it—we have all kinds of fancy new equipment upstairs.”
“Great. Thank you. Did you tell anyone that you had it?”
“No,” Ruth said. “I had an inkling where this old record player might be, and I went right to it.”
“All right, good, don’t tell anyone about this then.” I squeezed her shoulder and hustled out into the corridor to talk to Bonnie.
“SORRY TO YOU keep hanging on,” I said to Bonnie.
“No problem. I’m sorry I called you on this number, but you weren’t in your office, and Jenna said I should call you right away if I couldn’t reach her—”
“Where is she? I was just talking to her.” Actually, that had been almost an hour ago. The music had been that captivating.
“I don’t know—”
“All right—hold on again, just another second.”
I dashed up the stairs and out into the street.
I hailed a cab. “85th Street and York,” I told the driver.
I took Bonnie off hold.
“What’s going on?” she said on the phone.
“I’m just heading home,” I said. “I don’t like not knowing where Jenna is.”
“She’s OK, isn’t she?”
“Sure, I’m sure she is—she probably just ran out of milk or something, and one of the officers gave her an escort to the grocer. But look—you make sure you stay inside or, if you have to leave for any reason, please call me first.”
“OK, I will—”
“Good.” I took the phone away from my ear and put my thumb on the End key—
“Phil—”
“Yes?”
“The reason I called—”
“Right, yes,” I said. “You’ve done some more work on the translation?”
“Yes, I have…”
And she read to me the latest part she had translated—material beyond what Jenna had read to me…
“You sure of that?”
“Yes—”
“OK. You’ve done a wonderful job. Just stay in your apartment now. It’s the safest place for you.” I ended the phone call and went for my ID.
“There’s a hundred in it for you if you break every speed limit and get me to 85th Street as fast as fucking possible,” I told the driver. “Plus, consider this a police emergency.”
JENNA WAS STANDING in front of our brownstone, with two nervous cops—and Amos Stoltzfus.
Worst place she could be.
Amos was arguing with the cops, and it looked like Jenna was trying to mediate…
Kids were playing stickball in the street—no way my cab could get through quickly.
“OK, here is fine,” I told the cabbie, and peeled off six new twenties for him. He deserved it.
“Jenna!” I called, and started running towards her. But she was too far away to hear.
“Jenna!” I kept calling and running…
“Please, let’s go upstairs!” Amos was shouting at Jenna too.
“Keep back, son,” one of the officers said loudly
, pushing Amos back.
“Leave us alone!” Amos shouted. “You don’t understand! I have medicine for her—”
“Phil!” Jenna shouted and waved at me. Thank God!
One of the officers turned and glared at me. The other put an arm on his shoulder. “He’s OK. That’s Dr. D’Amato.”
I reached them, out of breath.
“I was just telling Mr. MD over here,” the officer who knew me said and gestured to Amos, “that there was no way in hell we’re going to let him inject Jenna or anyone with his shit and maybe she winds up dropping dead or coming down with AIDS—”
Amos protested. “It’s not an injection—”
“He’s right,” I said to the officer about Amos, “and also, that we shouldn’t be down here in the open like this—”
The officer collapsed.
“What—” the second officer began—
I pinned Jenna to the car, and covered her body with mine.
The second officer had his gun directed at Amos.
“Look!” Amos pointed to a man dressed in a mail carrier’s uniform across the street. “He killed your partner! He’s getting away!”
The officer turned for a second, gun still in hand—
“I’M OK, I’M OK,” Jenna said.
“He’s not,” Amos said, and gestured to the fallen officer.
I felt his neck; he was dead.
“Call for backup,” I said to the other cop, who was torn between the running man and his brother officer on the ground. “He won’t get very far on foot.”
“How do you know he doesn’t have a car stashed around the corner?” the officer asked.
“Stefan Antonescu doesn’t have a license—one of the first things I checked in this goddamned case. My guess is he doesn’t drive.”
“Stefan?” Jenna asked.
I shook my head yes, as did Amos.
“OK.” I made some instant decisions. Jenna was safest with me—whatever the risks, they were preferable to leaving her back here, either alone, or with Amos, or the officer. “Let’s go after him. All of us. But don’t fire unless he turns around to face us,” I told the officer, “and if you take him down, just make sure you don’t kill him. We’ll never get to the bottom of this if we kill him.”
WE CAUGHT UP with Stefan by the East River. He had climbed up on the railing.
“Just watch for the dart blower,” Amos said. “As long as he doesn’t have that in his mouth, he can’t hurt anyone.”
I nodded to the officer—Richard McCall was his name—and he nodded back.
“But drop him if he makes the slightest move to his mouth,” I said, and McCall nodded again. His revolver was drawn and pointed.
I walked a few steps towards Stefan.
He just looked at me.
“Just as it ever was,” he said. “You hunt the animal to the edge of the cliff, and push him over.”
“We’re not trying to kill you,” I said.
Stefan sneered.
“You run pretty fast for a three-hundred-year old,” I said.
“That’s because, depending on the scale, I’m closer to thirty,” he said.
“What does that mean?”…and the children it has set to walk among us like men…
“It means, your scientists discover our bones from the past, and think the longest we lived was thirty, forty years, when in fact we live ten times that amount of life in that time…”
“All the more reason to come with me now,” I said. “No one wants to kill you, believe me. You’ve got so much to teach us—you have most of your life ahead of you.”
He smiled. “You still fail to understand—my kind doesn’t live much longer than thirty of your years—maybe thirty-five, forty, at most. I’m at the end of my life—short and brutish, as some poet once said, by your standards—long and delicate, by mine…”
“And you spent so much of that time reading about silk in the library?” But it made sense, Stefan being thirty years old. We found no records of him—and none of the corpses in London and Toronto—because we were looking for men we thought were much older.
“Our brain capacity, and our capacity to learn quickly, far exceeds yours,” Stefan said. “I learned ten lifetimes of knowledge in that time, and not just about silk. But silk is relevant—we’re the caterpillar, the mother of your flimsy, flittering lives.”
“So why kill us, Stefan?”
He smiled again, his lips quivering, oddly beautiful in the sun that bounced off of the water. “You can ask that?” He lost his smile in the light. “You can ask that, when you have been killing us for thirty thousand years? We gave you music, we gave you magic—we gave you your much-vaunted looks, and what passes among your kind for cognition. Lum, at least, understood that. Who do you suppose was responsible for the Bombycidae in your genome that suppresses Neanderthal characteristics? We were. It was there all along in us, like genes from all sorts of insects, and we brought it forth, increased its prevalence so that it made an impact on the phenotype, over millennia of careful breeding. An experiment that went horribly wrong for us—an attempt to increase our longevity, our capacity to communicate—that instead brought into being you, our murderers. Eventually we came upon a cure—our cure, a cure for the disease that Cro-Magnons posed to Neanderthals. You might call it a retro-virus today—transmission of genetic material from the environment back into the genome. We found a way to infect you with something that undoes the Bombycidae, that brings back the Neanderthal within all of you.”
“That infection of yours also kills its recipients,” I said.
“Only if they are over thirty-five or forty,” Stefan said. “Remember, we do not live as long as you in actual years. A reconstituted Neanderthal over fifty dies almost the instant the reconversion is complete.”
I thought of Dave Spencer dying, of my surviving, after we had both been exposed to the virus. Dave had been in his early sixties, had had a good twenty-five years on me. And I thought of the additional piece of the Tocharian manuscript that Bonnie had read to me in the taxi. The writer was a singer, or thought he had become one. A very old man—Yacob—who had sung with the singers, and then joined them. How had he survived? He had managed to join them “without transformation,” Bonnie had read from the manuscript—which must have meant that he had remained Homo sapiens sapiens, either because he had not been infected, or he had been a given a more powerful dose of Bombyx mori antidote, or perhaps he had some natural immunity. But Yacob had realized that some of the singers were bent on taking revenge. And he had come to realize the scope of it—“our entire human family is in peril,” the manuscript said. Of course we were: if the difference between us and Neanderthals was Bombycidae in our genes, and a virus or whatever was afoot that could block out the Bombycidae… How much protection could even all the silk in the world provide from that? How long would the protection last with more and more of the virus at large? It presumably had been a rarity until now… We had the murderer now, but the death he had caused was a drop in a bottomless bucket…
I looked into Stefan’s dark eyes. “Those first three corpses—in New York, Toronto, and London—they were the first round in your plan to infect all of humanity? What made you start that now?”
“My kind didn’t start it,” Antonescu said. “Just like we didn’t start the killing thirty millennia ago. Your kind did—both times! Gerry Moses had been hunting us down for years. He thought he could make a name for himself by exposing us—he thought he could get everyone’s attention by presenting newfound Neanderthal mummies to the world. He knew some things about the virus, what it could do… So he took three patients on life-support from a Toronto hospital—patients in which the families had indicated that they wanted cremation, so no one would be the wiser when he talked some doctor into pronouncing them dead, all for the sake of your science. And he gave them the virus, and treated them with homeopathic compounds after they died a few months later so they appeared to be naturally mummified, and he had one p
lanted in Toronto, one in London, one in New York. He was a clever man. He timed it to coincide with a meeting we were having in Budapest, while we were away. He figured you and Michael Mallory would get the investigation rolling, and then he would come up with the answer, be the hero. But the virus got him too—he underestimated its power, realized too late how tea enhances the silk, how other stimulants reduce it. He lacked your Amish friends, and their understanding, feeble as it was, but accurate, of the silk cure…”
He looked at Amos.
“How come you drink tea, and stay so close to silk?” I asked.
“The virus hurts us too,” Stefan replied. “It not only turns your kind into us, but it kills our kind as well. My ancestors realized this too late—their secret weapon cut both ways. It nearly completed the job that your kind started thirty thousand years ago. Silk against the skin, amplified by tea in the belly, is our best defense against it…”
I heard police sirens. The backup…
I had to keep him talking about this. “I promise you that—”
“That what? If I come in to your custody, I won’t be harmed? Just like Homo sapiens sapiens has been promising us since they first walked so proud and erect on this Earth? You better worry about your own kind—what will happen to all of you if that virus ever makes love to another, and jumps from a contact sport to a plague. You’ll wish my little darts had felled all of you when that happens—”
“Stefan—”
“—but even if I believed you, that I wouldn’t be harmed, you think I want to live in what you would have in store for me? A living fossil, to be examined? You want me to live so much? Tell you what: I’ll put this reed to my mouth, and blow its poison bee at you, and then I’ll surrender. Your life for mine, Dr. Phil D’Amato. Are you willing to make that trade for your people? Do you care that much for my knowledge?”
“Please, don’t do that,” I said. “Please keep your hands where we can see them. We can talk about this—”
“I didn’t think so. I didn’t think you really cared that much about your species to make the sacrifice. Goodbye, Dr. D’Amato. I won’t say, goodbye my friend. Because you aren’t my friend; your kind never can be, never truly—”
The Silk Code Page 29