The Silk Code

by Paul Levinson

“The other one was strangled?” Herby asked.

  “Looks that way,” Dugan replied.

  “We’ll know more after the full autopsy,” Herby said.

  “Speaking of timing, what were you doing in the middle of the night last night?” Dugan asked me.

  “Sound asleep, right next to Jenna,” I replied.

  “And since she was presumably sound asleep too, that’s not much of an alibi,” Dugan said.

  “Since when the hell do I need an alibi—”

  MY OFFICE FELT like a dungeon.

  I’d managed to pick up some folders—when I hoped no one was looking—that apparently had slid between Debbie’s desk and her printer table. I had no idea how much of her work she did online, how much through old-fashioned notes and clippings, but it certainly could not hurt to see what I could find here.

  My first glances had revealed nothing too interesting—nothing at all, in fact, on her article about me in today’s Times. I’d assumed that her murder had something to do with that article, but now I began to suspect Debbie had not written it. So she was murdered why? To cover up the fact that someone had somehow planted that article under her name?

  I rubbed my eyes, and flipped through the manila folders again. She’d managed an article at least once every two weeks, and there were scribbled notes for most of the recent ones. That lent some kind of credence to my thought that she had not written the article about me. Or maybe her murderer stole her notes.

  The most current folder had material about her human genome article in the paper last week. The usual suspects were quoted from MIT, Rockefeller University, and—jeez, I hadn’t noticed that highlighted section on the back of one of the sheets the first time I had leafed through them. And the phone number that was scribbled along side it…

  “I DON’T CARE how much you don’t trust the phone,” I said, trying to keep my raised voice as civil as possible. “I don’t have time to fly up and see you now. I swear to God, if you don’t talk to me, I’ll call up The New York Times myself, right after we get off the phone, and see to it that your name is plastered all over the front page tomorrow!” Of course, I didn’t have that kind of clout, but Lum couldn’t know that for sure.

  “It’s just speculation at this point,” he said.

  “Good, speculate then,” I said.

  Lum sighed. “The genome people think they’ve identified some sequences in the human code that look a lot like Bombycidae.”

  “Bombyx mori?”

  “Not exactly,” Lum replied. “A different moth. But the same family.”

  “So someone contaminated the human DNA with silk? Where did these studies originate? MIT, Caltech, England?”

  “That’s the problem,” Lum said. “The silk sequences seem present in all human samples thus far examined.”

  “But how—”

  “The presence in itself is not surprising,” Lum said. “There are lots of specific sequences in humans that seem taken from other species—we’ve known about near identities in the Lachesin gene in grasshoppers and fruit flies and similar genes in cows and humans for years now. All DNA life on Earth is, after all, related.”

  “Sure, but—”

  “What struck me about this one is that I had just been going over a Neanderthal profile, and it seems to lack that Bombycidae sequence.”

  “So the differences between us and Neanderthals is we have a silk sequence already in our genes?”

  “Maybe,” Lum said. “There are lots of genes, as you know, that apparently amount to nothing—have no discernible effect on the phenotype as far as we can tell. Free riders, genes that served some purpose in the distant past and now serve none—who knows. The real question, I think, is how was this Bombycidae sequence introduced into our genome? Did it arise naturally?”

  I thought of John Lapp and Amos Stoltzfus and the artificial selection they claimed their people had been practicing for centuries, maybe longer…

  “You and Debbie talked about all of this?” I asked.

  “Tesa Stewart too,” Lum said. “We had some mutual friends in the field. A great loss to science!” His voice cracked with emotion.

  “I know,” I said, softly.

  “Look, I talked to Tesa and Debbie on the phone,” Lum continued. “I trusted them. I don’t mind talking to you. But let’s be smart about this. Let me send you a letter with a public phone number that you can call. We can do it by appointment—that’s how I did it with Tesa and Debbie.”

  Yeah, and a lot of good it did them, I thought.

  I RECLINED IN my chair and closed my eyes after I got off the phone with Lum.

  Could Bombycidae sequences in our genome—or sequences that resembled Bombycidae—have made us fully human? Could they account for our differences from Neanderthals, our language, our culture, our technology where presumably they had so little? Hard to believe. Certainly moths had no Beatles, no Mozart, no Picasso. But insects, in their way, were masters of communication, and technology too. The societies of bees and ants, the communication among their members, the hives and nests they constructed had been the stuff of sociobiology for decades now. And the very Lachesin gene that Lum had mentioned, if I remembered my Science readings correctly, helped govern the growth of neuronal cells…

  But what connection did this have to Tesa and Debbie?

  They were killed because they knew something more about this?

  Killed by whom?

  And what connection did it have to Dave Spencer and Gerry Moses?

  Did the virus I was postulating somehow undo the effect of the Bombycidae in our genes? Is that why Bombyx mori seemed some kind of antidote?

  The phone rang.

  “Hello.”

  “Hi honey.” Jenna was returning my call. She’d left before I’d awoken this morning, to see her friend for breakfast up at Columbia. “Bonnie says Mallory’s translation of the Tocharian is good, so that’s at least a start.”

  “Fine.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  I told her about Tesa and Debbie, about my conversation with Lum, about how I didn’t feel very good right now about involving anyone else in this goddamn case.

  “Oh God, we just had dinner with Tesa last week,” Jenna said.

  “Yeah. It looks like she walked in on the murder. Debbie was killed ritually. Tesa was slashed in a rage. It had something to do with Debbie’s last two stories in the Times, I’m sure. I just can’t tell which one.”

  “I still can’t believe Debbie wrote that story about you.”

  “I was thinking the same thing,” I said.

  “So who wrote it?” Jenna asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “If someone wanted me off the case, but didn’t want to come right out and kill me because it would attract too much attention, a good way of doing that would be to somehow get a story in the papers under Debbie’s byline that made me look bad, and then kill Debbie, which has the double advantage of stopping Debbie from protesting the forgery, and casting suspicion on me as her murderer by giving me a motive. And maybe it also provides the additional service of shutting down Debbie’s investigation of the Bombycidae in our genes, if she was digging into that.”

  “You were so angry at her that you killed her? Anyone who knew you would know that was absurd.”

  “Maybe the killer doesn’t know me… Hell, this case has gotten everyone so crazy even Dugan half suspects me.”

  “Ridiculous,” Jenna said. “You were in bed with me all night.”

  “I know,” I said, and thought again, as I often did, about how good it felt waking up with her next to me every morning…“I’m worried about you,” I said gently. “Heathrow was one thing—that was across the Atlantic, and Mallory was right to think that guy with the knife likely had nothing to do with this case. But Debbie and Tesa are another story. Their killer is probably still in town. And Tesa was slashed. Puts what happened at Heathrow in a whole other light—”

  “Stop it! You’re scaring me!”
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  “That’s the idea,” I said. “Look, this could still all be coincidence—Tesa was acting a little strange recently, maybe a boyfriend of Debbie was stalking her, but—”

  “I know. You don’t believe in coincidence.”

  “Right. Especially not when there are more plausible explanations. I’m going to go downtown and see if I can talk to Stefan—maybe he can be of help. But you’ve got to be careful, observant. Let me know right away if you see anything odd, if you sense anything unusual. I’d rather you over-react with a false alarm, then…well, you know what I mean. OK?”

  Jenna didn’t respond.

  “You OK?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “You know, I just remembered, when I left our apartment this morning. I stopped into the Yorkville, and grabbed a tea to go.”

  “Yes?”

  “Well, there was someone wolfing down a big breakfast at a table. And I sort of felt like he was staring at me, in an odd way.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “Definitely not Neanderthal.” Jenna laughed, nervously. “And I mean, he didn’t look like anyone I actually knew, but, well…”

  “He reminded you of someone? All right, listen. I’m sending a patrol car over for you right away. Sit tight, and tell me where you are.”

  “The library. I’m at a pay phone in the lobby of Butler Library. Bonnie was called in for some sort of consult in the Basque section over here—”

  “OK, good. The lobby should be safe. Don’t move from there until you see the two uniforms.”

  “OK,” Jenna said. “It’s not that he reminded me of someone in particular. But that guy in the restaurant—I don’t know, he was wearing normal clothes, but he looked Amish.”

  “STEFAN ANTONESCU? MY name is Amos Stoltzfus.” A man under twenty extended his hand to a man who said he was three hundred.

  Antonescu regarded the hand, but didn’t take it. “Do I know you?”

  “No,” Amos said. “May I sit down?” He sat down as quietly as he could at the Bobst Library table.

  “There’s no point in my answering,” Antonescu said. “It seems you’ve sat down already. And this is a public table, so you’re entitled to sit here whatever my preference.”

  “You don’t know me,” Amos said. “But we both have the same friend, Dr. Phil D’Amato.”

  Antonescu nodded. “Are you Amish?”

  Amos nodded back.

  “I thought so,” Antonescu said. “You’ll be safe here—people will think you’re just one of the Hasidim.”

  “Hasidim?”

  “Yes,” Antonescu replied. “Members of an orthodox Jewish sect, with beards and black clothes. Much like you. Many Hasidim are in this part of the city—New York University is really just over the bridge from Brooklyn.”

  “Phil—Dr. D’Amato—once told me he was Jewish. Marrano?”

  “Yes,” Antonescu said. “His people were persecuted doing the Spanish inquisition. Some changed their names, pretended to be Catholic, but they kept their Jewish identity. Persecution’s a terrible thing. My people have been persecuted for more than thirty thousand years.”

  “I know,” Amos said softly, his eyes wide. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry,” Antonescu said. “Your specific people are not the ones responsible.”

  “I know,” Amos said. “But… I’m still sorry about what happened to your people. My people have known persecution too. That’s why I’m here—I thought we could put together our information. There’s danger. My friends know many secrets of nature. That’s why we succeed without electricity—nature is stronger.”

  “You know one of the secrets of silk. You saved Dr. D’Amato’s life with it. He told me.”

  Amos nodded. “But now he’s in danger again. All of us are. We may need more than silk.”

  Antonescu looked around the room. “Shall we go for a walk in the park? It was a lovely July day when I arrived this morning—not too hot.”

  “OK…” Amos said.

  “I’ll just return these books to the stacks,” Antonescu said.

  Amos trembled. “A room with stacks and stacks of books makes me nervous. I prefer voices and people.”

  “I understand,” Antonescu said. “I’ll just be a minute.”

  Amos walked over to Ruth Delany’s desk.

  “Did you find him?” she asked, and smiled.

  “Yes,” Amos returned the smile. “Thank you, Missus.”

  A PHONE RANG once on the corner of Washington Square Park.

  “You took your sweet time to get back to me,” a man said, looking out at pigeons and passersby with equal malignance. “You’ll never guess who just walked by here not ten minutes ago—that moron Amish waiter I took care of in Pennsylvania last month! I stuck him right proper with my knife! And here he is strolling bright as day into the bleeding library! I can finish the job right now.” He felt the hilt of the knife in his belt.

  “I see you’re back in fine Cockney speech,” the voice on the phone said. “Good, I much prefer it to the Brooklynese.”

  “What about that Amish waiter—”

  “No, I think there’s been nearly enough killing for one day, don’t you?” the voice on the phone asked.

  The man with the knife laughed. “‘Nearly enough’?—now what the hell does that mean? Listen, that waiter saw my face—he can identify me—that’s why I need to take care of him.”

  “We’ll deal with that problem another way,” the voice said. “No need for you to worry.”

  “OK, so how much longer do you want me to stay here?”

  “Not much longer,” the voice said.

  A lady with a shopping cart full of groceries approached the phone. She smiled sweetly. “Excuse me. Will you be on the phone much longer? I need to call my grandson.”

  “Yeah, a lot longer. Use another phone.”

  “Who’s that?” the voice on the phone said.

  “I don’t know. Some hag—Hey!”

  The woman had pulled out a hypodermic needle and with one swift motion had plunged it into his arm in the second he had turned his back on her and talked into the phone. She emptied the contents into his vein—an ancient compound virtually indistinguishable in composition and effect from pure heroin, except she didn’t have to get it from a dealer…

  He slumped to the ground, first happier than he had ever been in his life, then dead.

  The woman bent over the body and removed the knife from the belt. She stood up, took hold of the dangling phone receiver, and said a few words.

  “Thank you,” the voice on the phone said. “And you can tell our recently departed friend that now the killing has definitely reached the saturation point for today. We’ve progressed from nearly enough to more than enough, I’m sure. Unfortunately, now that the meaning of ‘nearly enough’ is clear, it’s too late for him to understand it.”

  The woman hadn’t understood much beyond the first two words either, but she said yeah. “I’m heading up to catch my train at Penn Station,” she concluded, cheerily. “The air is still too polluted in this city for me to be really comfortable here…”

  Antonescu and Stoltzfus passed her on the corner a little while later. They walked by the phone a few minutes after that.

  Stoltzfus never noticed the body on the ground. His eyes were on the trees.

  Antonescu did, but said nothing. He’d seen much like it in this city, this century, this world before.

  I GAVE THE cabbie a five dollar bill and told him to keep the change.

  He stuck his head out of the window and glared at me. “Hey thanks, buddy, the fare comes to five dollars!”

  “Sorry.” I handed him another five dollar bill.

  Washington Square Park was bursting in every direction—flower ladies from the Phil Ochs song, skateboarders criss-crossing around me at angles that made fractals look simple, a drunk passed out on a bench, another under a phone, babies and toddlers and mothers and grandmas, couples in all combinations… Bu
t no sign of Antonescu or anyone Amish, even though Ruth Delany had told me on the cell phone that Stefan and “an Amish boy” had gone out for a walk here just minutes ago…

  A doo-wop group was singing “Life Could Be A Dream” by the fountain, and attracting quite a crowd. I stopped for a moment to collect my thoughts and a bag of peanuts from a vendor. How could the same world accommodate such joy and such brutality? Because some people took their joy in brutality, that was why. Because for some people, erasing another person, erasing a whole people, was no more than erasing unwanted data from a hard disk. Digital data, DNA, just another code, another recipe discarded…

  I looked at a stream of butterflies on the far side of the fountain. Flutterbys to the sky. I followed their path back down to the hand that was releasing them. A small crowd had gathered around the person setting the butterflies free. The monarchs glittered, gold and black, in the sunlight. And then the emigration was over. The crowd began to unravel. The man with the hand turned towards me.

  Amos!

  I rushed over to him—

  “Phil! I was just sending a message home,” he said, “and then I was going to get in touch with you.”

  “Where’s Stefan? Is he OK?”

  “Stefan Antonescu? Yes, he’s fine. He went back to the library about ten minutes ago. We had a very good conversation.”

  I looked through the park towards Bobst Library, red sandstone through green trees.

  “What’s the matter, Phil. You look like you don’t believe me! We can go see Stefan right now—”

  “No, I believe you.” I told Amos about the murders, about Jenna thinking she saw someone who was possibly him at the Yorkville Restaurant.

  “Yes, that was me,” Amos said. “I guess seeing Jenna threw me off—I didn’t know if she would be heading back home, I didn’t know how much of this you had told her, what you wanted her to know. I remembered your not wanting us to tell her too much when we were giving you the cure. So I figured I’d see Stefan first and contact you later…”

  “How did you know what she looked like?”

  “You showed me her picture, remember?”

  I nodded. I had.

  A silken cat approached us, and sidled up to Amos.

  “Hyram,” I said. I hadn’t seen him since I’d left Pennsylvania—