The Silk Code

by Paul Levinson

  “There’s no self-protection from that kind of attack,” Mallory said. “Happens all too often in London these days—we’re becoming more like New York City every day.”

  “Hey, crime rate in New York has been down for a while now,” I said, managing a smile.

  “You can’t think what happened to Phil is coincidence,” Jenna said. This was the first time she and Mallory had been in my hospital room at the same time. She was not smiling at all.

  “I don’t know what to think,” Mallory said. “Antonescu turns up alive in New York. Phil, the New York man in this investigation, turns up slashed at Heathrow. Coincidence? Maybe. Maybe not. If someone, whoever it is who is behind this, wanted to shut down the New York part of the escapade, that one-two punch would be a good way of doing it. Damn good thing that knife wasn’t a few inches higher.”

  “But killing Phil, if that’s what they wanted to do, only calls attention to this,” Jenna said.

  “Yes, but it’s the ancient calculus of assassination, love,” Mallory replied. “If the death of someone has a net result of less adverse knowledge afoot, even with the publicity the death brings, then you kill that person. Assuming the folks who do the calculus have no moral qualms about murder.”

  “I’m enjoying this conversation immensely,” I said, sourly. “What do you know about the guy—you said the ID in the bill-fold was Joey Beiler—who apparently lacked that qualm, at least regarding me? His grunts sounded Cockney, with maybe a German or Swiss undertone.”

  “Lots of nuances for a grunt,” Mallory said. “And an odd combination. Germans are usually closer to royalty than Cockney hereabouts.” He said this with a faint air of disdain, directed to the royalty part of the comment.

  “What made you think it was Swiss?” Jenna asked.

  “I don’t know…”

  “The Amish have Swiss-German roots,” she said.

  “Amish?” Mallory asked. “You think they have a connection to this?”

  “Well, Chautauqua has an Amish community,” she replied. “My aunt used to go there every summer. That’s where Gerry Moses died.”

  Mallory took it in. “Righto. In any case, we’re still checking after Joey Beiler. Nothing on that name anywhere as yet.”

  “Great,” I said.

  Mallory exhaled slowly. “Well. I’ll go ring up my man to see if our car is ready for you. This time we’re taking no chances—you’ll be under our protection until your plane takes off.”

  I WAS BACK at my desk three days later. My knifing had convinced the Department to keep the case open a “little longer”—hey, whatever it took. First order of business was seeing Stefan Antonescu. I could see as soon as he walked in that he would be a reluctant participant in our conversation.

  “Thanks for coming by, Mr. Antonescu. Please have a seat. Make yourself comfortable. Can I get you something to drink?”

  He certainly looked a lot younger than the mummy, though I couldn’t say the same about his jacket, which hung like a slice of withered, shiny green corned beef off his stocky body. Likely some old gabardine—certainly not silk. But there was that dandy blue silk hanky all right, sticking right out of his pocket just like Ruth Delany had said.

  “Thank you. Do you have tea?”

  “Of course we do, Mr. Antonescu. Would you like it hot or with ice?” His voice was amazingly sweet, almost musical, with a soft, unplaceable accent. Didn’t jibe at all with his heavy-browed face. But I understood exactly what Delany had meant about his being gentle. He seemed more than that—almost childlike, big but fragile. A fragile Neanderthal who liked tea. Not your average diorama Neanderthal by any means.

  “Hot, please.”

  “Milk? Sugar?” I poured the water over the bag in a cup.

  “Neither, thank you. And please, let it brew for about five minutes.”

  “Of course,” I said. “OK, now that we—”

  “Incidentally, your thanks for my coming over here are misplaced. I hadn’t much choice in the matter—two of your policemen conveyed your invitation. I could hardly have refused.”

  “You aren’t under arrest, Mr. Antonescu. You could have refused. But I’m glad you’re here.”

  “And here I am. What’s on your mind, Dr. D’Amato?”

  It wasn’t yet five minutes, but I brought the tea over to him anyway. “I’ve left the teabag in. You can keep it in longer if you like.”

  Antonescu nodded. He coaxed the teabag in and out of the water like he was making love to it.

  “You know about the mummy that turned up in the men’s room where you work?” I asked.

  He nodded again. “Lots of people work at the Bobst Library. Lots of people use the bathroom.”

  “I’m interested in your views on that mummy.”

  “My views?”

  “That’s right.”

  For the first time, Antonescu smiled. Almost laughed. “What do you want me to say? Mrs. Delany told me you think the mummy is Neanderthal. I obviously look like a Neanderthal—I’ve lived with that all of my life. You thought the mummy was me. I find this whole thing ridiculous.”

  “Well, you’re not alone in that, but there are still some things about this that we need to investigate.” I rubbed my stomach, which still itched over the wound. Looks just like my mother’s caesarean, Jenna had said. “Let’s try another subject,” I continued. “I understand you have an interest in silk.”

  “That’s right,” Antonescu said. Something flickered in his eyes, just a bit too fast for me to fathom. “Ssu—what the world now calls silk—is one of China’s greatest gifts to humankind.”

  “Hardly a gift at first,” I said. “Raw silk was exported. But export of silkworm eggs was punishable by death for most of China’s history.”

  “That didn’t prevent some monks from smuggling the eggs out of China in a hollow cane, in the time of Justinian and your Eastern Roman Empire,” he retorted. “Not that I blame you—the recipe is always more valuable than the cake.”

  “That so?” This man spoke as if I was in the employ of the Empire rather than the City.

  “Yes,” he said. “Cakes, even when made of stone, crumble. Recipes can endure forever.”

  “And is the DNA of the silkworm part of the recipe?”

  Antonescu sipped his tea for the first time. “It’s good,” he said.

  “Jenna brought back some bottled water from England,” I said. “Works every time.”

  He looked at me appraisingly. “So you understand that the key to good tea is not only the tea but the quality of the water—the flesh in which the recipe finds its life. That is commendable.” He nodded. “Few people comprehend that.”

  “I’ve known that for some time,” I said. “It’s why the tea in Teaneck tastes like dishwater.”

  He frowned, presumably in low esteem of New Jersey tea.

  “Let’s get back to flesh and recipes,” I said.

  “Yes, flesh,” Antonescu obliged. “You know, unexpected mummies and their desiccated flesh are not unique to New York. You found a corpse here, more than a hundred Caucasian mummies have been found in the past few decades in the Tarim Basin in Xinjiang Province. I’m sure one or two people associated with that project met their deaths since then too. I haven’t read about anyone conducting an investigation about that.”

  “You mean the Tocharian mummies? Long noses and deep-set eyes, light hair, thin lips and their language was some sort of Indo-European?” I’d cut out and saved the front-page article that had appeared about them in The New York Times science section. Indo-European gene pools were one of my fascinations.

  Antonescu nodded, sipped more tea.

  “But the Tocharians got to northwest China by a well-trodden route—the Silk Road,” I said. “That was in what, six or seven hundred A.D.? Not long after Justinian or the Persians had broken the Chinese monopoly on silkworms.”

  Antonescu nodded again. “That’s the date of the Tocharian manuscripts that were found there. The oldest Caucasian mumm
ies go as far back as four thousand years. Maybe earlier.”

  He was right about that. “OK, and we know how they got there. That overland route was well-established. What road brought us the mummy we discovered in the NYU library?”

  “Perhaps the road of frost—the killing frost—the road not taken.”

  I looked at him. Was this janitor who looked like a Neanderthal and dressed like he’d raided a discount store on 14th Street quoting Shakespeare and Robert Frost to me? His erudition was astonishing.

  “The mummy had a handkerchief just like yours,” I said.

  “Really? You know what they say: clothes make the man.”

  “You’re a real font of wisdom, Mr. Antonescu.”

  He smiled. “An advantage of working in a library.”

  “Hard to believe someone with your intelligence would be satisfied working as a janitor, even with its reading privileges,” I said.

  “One could well say the same about you, Dr. D’Amato—conversing with possible criminals is not likely what Comenius had in mind when he talked about participating in the Great Dialogue.”

  The phone rang. Some great dialogue from Dave on another case—one which I couldn’t bring myself to care too much about.

  Antonescu stood up. “Can I go now?”

  I asked Dave to hold on. “Yes,” I told Antonescu. “And thanks again for coming by. I’ll be in touch again if I need anything more.”

  “I’M BEGINNING TO feel like the wound is closing, healing up, before we’ve had a chance to come close to understanding what caused it,” I said to Jenna. I wasn’t talking about the scab on my stomach.

  She ran her hand over it, her ear on my breast. “You want what?” she murmured. “Another corpse or two? Another knife attack? That’s the trouble with forensic science—it collects evidence at the price of human life.”

  I sighed. “You’re right. I know. It’s just that usually one person dies here, another there, a third one in somewhat different but related circumstances, and I can begin to see a common denominator, a pattern. With these mummies, everything’s stopped cold. I got a message through to John Lapp on his farm—he got back to me that he has no idea what’s going on. No one other than Antonescu has turned up alive. No one else has died; no one else has been injured. I’m glad about that, of course—”

  “Me too,” she said, and moved her mouth close to my lips, sucking in my lower lip, grazing it with her teeth, extending her body full and naked and warm over mine…

  Later, I gently stroked the small of her back, as she lay soft and sleeping at my side. Maybe I ought to let the whole case slide, get back to the grungy mundane business of murderers and their victims that I was paid to investigate in New York. The world seemed so peaceful, at rest tonight. So soft…like silk…

  Dammit, there was too much silk in this case to be just coincidence. Lum had finally sent down a report with Gerry Moses’ DNA profile, and that had the Bombyx mori signature. The traces of Antonescu’s DNA we’d managed to recover from his teacup—pretty much right-down-the-middle Homo sapiens sapiens DNA, varying from the average in just eight positions—also came with a few sequences of Bombyx mori DNA. I guess that was no surprise, in view of his blue hanky. But still…there was silk in too many places here—places where it may have belonged, places where it didn’t. And I didn’t care what John Lapp said—silk is produced by caterpillars, they’re insects just like beetles and fireflies—Mallory had the right idea about the Amish. There had to be some connection. Dave had laughed me off the phone when I’d mentioned it, but what did he know about bug-tech?

  I recalled what I’d once read in an old philosophy of science book years ago, maybe by John Dewey. You need to do more than merely observe the universe, wait for evidence, to really understand it. You need to perturb it—disturb it—cause some sort of significant ripple and then gauge its effects. You had to shake it loose to comprehend it. Fire a particle into an atom to fathom its structure…

  I had an idea about firing a few of my own.

  TEN

  May wasn’t the month I would have chosen to go back to Pennsylvania. Even the first part of June was too early, ahead of the cherries, strawberries, corn that would dress up this area, make my mouth water just to look at it.

  But this was not a trip of choice—or pleasure.

  I pulled in my little Buick against the sidewalk next to the General Sutter Inn in Lititz. After a lifetime of parallel parking in New York City, this was child’s play. I doubted that much of what lay ahead would be.

  I looked around the restaurant—simple wooden tables with plain plaid tablecloths, and a single milk-white flower in a Tynant blue water bottle on each. One of the tables had something more.

  “John?” I walked over and extended my hand.

  He took it in an iron squeeze. “Did you have a comfortable trip? Please, sit down.”

  “Thank you.”

  He looked just as he had last year—Abraham Lincoln beard, suspenders holding up sack-like pants, but something more in his eyes, his demeanor. Amish, plus something else.

  Lapp smiled. His teeth looked yellow, uneven—yet healthy. He drank what looked like lemonade, from a glass that looked like it was made out of quartz. “Lemonade tastes better in glasses, wouldn’t you agree? It’s the container that counts. Your science makes too much of the inside, I think. The vessel, the carrier, is sometimes more important.”

  “Oh?” In addition to everything else, Lapp was an Amish McLuhan. The medium is the message…

  “What are genes—what can they do?—without vessels to actually move them about in this world of ours,” Lapp explained. “We, my people, devote our attention to the vessels, and let the genes take care of themselves.”

  “What about genetic diseases?” I asked.

  “Genes only kill when someone tampers with them,” Lapp replied.

  “So you’re saying what, that what we know as genetic diseases were the result of someone tampering with genes? When exactly do you think this happened?”

  “History didn’t begin with what your historians think was the beginning,” Lapp replied.

  A cat with long silken hair brushed against my leg, and purred. I extended an index finger, and the cat met it with its nose. I smiled. “I guess I remind her of someone.”

  “Him,” Lapp said.

  “Him,” I echoed. “Interesting eyes.” I stared into orbs that looked up into mine, and almost made me dizzy. “They look sort of canine. What kind of cat is he?”

  “Watch-cat,” Lapp replied. “We call them watch-cats.”

  “How long have you had them?”

  “A very long time,” Lapp said. “Your biology books say the cat and dog lines first diverged many millions of years ago.”

  “Who is Stefan Antonescu?” I asked. “That name means nothing to you?”

  Lapp slowly shook his head no. “Never heard of him—as I told you when I answered your message.”

  I shook my head too. There was no point playing police interrogator with this man, trying to get something out of him by rattling him with an unexpected question.

  “Allow me to at least give you a little temporary gift, to see you through these difficulties,” Lapp said. “Although in truth, it seems Hyram has already chosen you.”

  He looked down at the cat, who now was snuggling the whole length of his body against my leg…

  A waiter who looked to be Amish, but probably was Mennonite if he was working in a restaurant, finally appeared. “Nothing for me,” I said, and rubbed my unsettled stomach. Then…“Wait a minute? Amos? I hardly recognized you with your beard grown in!”

  Amos smiled, clapped me on the back. “So I see our medicine worked well for you.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Though I have to admit I don’t feel too great right now.” Truth was that I had had a splitting headache the last few miles on the Turnpike. In fact, one of the reasons I had come out here is that I hadn’t been feeling too well… Now my stomach was really ac
ting up. “Is there a bathroom…”

  “Sure,” Amos said, and pointed to the far side of the room…

  I barely made it to the sink.

  I splashed cold water on my face, but I couldn’t feel it.

  Amos and John and Hyram came through the door…

  I AWOKE IN a bed with no recollection of how I got there, for a second time in a month.

  I heard someone mumbling about “the cure”…

  I awoke again, later.

  There was no nurse in the room, just a cat, with wise brown eyes. “Hyram…”

  He purred and left.

  He came back with Lapp, a few moments later.

  I propped myself up, feeling pretty good. “You’re going to tell me, ‘You had us worried there for a while, it was a close call, but you’re all right now,’ right?”

  Lapp frowned. “No, I don’t go to the movies. But I’m glad to see that you’re better.”

  “How long was I out?”

  “Three days,” Lapp replied.

  “What did I have? How did you cure it?”

  “The remedy was silk.”

  “Jenna—”

  “We got word through to her,” Lapp said. “She knows you’re OK.”

  “Is what I had—contagious?”

  “It depends…”

  I DECIDED TO go straight through to Toronto. Let Jenna think I was still in Pennsylvania—no point in exposing her to this illness anymore than she already had been. Better to give her a few more days away from me, in case there was anything still infectious in me. I arranged for packages with Amish medications and explanations to be sent to Jenna and Dave and Mallory. As for Lum—well, I’d bring him these in person. And if I was right, he’d already had a lot more exposure to this than I could possibly give him in my recovered state…

  The Toronto airport felt cold—even though it was May, even though the inside would certainly have been heated had it been earlier in the year. Somehow, just being in Canada made me cold. Or maybe it was a lingering symptom of what I’d just been through…

  “Business or pleasure?”