The Silk Code

by Paul Levinson

  “Because I know these people,” I said. “John Lapp and Amos Stoltzfus. They saved my life. At least twice. They gave me an antidote once, for an allergen that had killed my friend, and I was fine. And two months ago they gave me their ‘cure’ for the cold fusion virus that killed Dave Spencer.”

  “Perhaps they were setting you up just to believe them now,” Mallory said.

  “No,” I said. “They’re fighting the same thing we are—some kind of ancient, Amish-like group, that has some connection to the Neanderthals. I’m sure of it.”

  “But you have no idea who that group is,” Mallory said.

  I stood up and walked to the door. “I have an appointment with someone for lunch in Manchester, who may be able to provide some help. Then I have a plane to catch. In the meantime, ask Amanda about the silk phosphate when she wakes up—she’ll at least be able to bear me out on that part. Run a screen on her blood too—do a new DNA scan for her—maybe it’ll pick up some trace of the poison.”

  “I’LL HAVE THE veal parmigiana, it’s very good here,” Mary Radcliff said to the waiter. She turned to me and wrinkled her nose, mischievously. “I love Italian food!”

  “Me too,” I said. “And I’ll have the shrimp scampi,” I said to the waiter. We were in Manny’s in Bolton, near Manchester. Mary had asked to eat there, after graciously accepting my last-minute invitation yesterday to lunch and conversation. She was seventy-eight, associated with the Silk Museum in nearby Macclesfield, and reputed to know all there was to know about the Jacquard Machine. Well, others likely knew as much, maybe more, but Mary was the only one available today.

  “So tell me about the Jacquard,” I said, pouring her some red wine from the carafe we had ordered.

  “Oh, it’s a wonderful machine,” Mary said. “A real miracle of human ingenuity.”

  “How do the cards work—how do they control the weaving?”

  “Oh, the cards are mounted on the cylinder, which controls the griff that lifts the hooks. And this lifts the warp threads…”

  “Warp threads?”

  “Yes, warp, like full speed ahead!” Mary chuckled. “But, seriously, the warp is one of the longitudinal threads—”

  “OK.” I smiled. “So tell me more about the how the cards work in your star-drive silk machine.” I refilled her glass.

  “Where were we?” Mary said. “Yes, the cards in the Jacquard. Well, the face of the cylinder has perforations opposite each needle, so when the cylinder and the needles press close together, the needles enter the perforations. But when a card is placed between the cylinder and the needles, and the card has only some perforations, the unperforated parts of the card will prevent the needles from entering the cylinder’s perforations at those places. Those needles get pushed back on their springs, so when the griff ascends, the hooks for those needles are not lifted, so they don’t touch the warp threads… It’s all quite beautiful, really, a mechanical ballet.”

  “Yes, and you describe it beautifully, Mary. Tell me, how are the cards perforated in the first place?”

  “The design is painted at first—the design of which parts of the card should be perforated—and then a special machine punches out the sets of cards. The number of cards needed for any pattern equals the number of weft threads—the number of horizontal threads in the weave.”

  “Amazing,” I said. “It’s a computer before computers—the design is a code for weaving. And all of this was done in the early 1700s?”

  “Well, Falcon did some of it back in 1728—he operated his machine with perforated cards. But that machine was much more cumbersome than the Jacquard—another worker was required to physically pull the cords after the card’s selections were made. The Jacquard does that automatically. That’s the beauty of it.”

  “Could such devices go back even earlier—perhaps to the ancient world? Heron of Alexandria and of course Archimedes invented some pretty sophisticated things…”

  “Well, it’s of course possible,” Mary said. “Since no electricity was required—it’s all mechanics—certainly it was within reach, in principle, of the ancients. But, of course, so much was destroyed in those fires in Alexandria… Who can say—”

  The waiter appeared with our food. I turned around to take the plates for Mary and me, and spilled a drop of wine on my tie—story of my life. I patted it dry.

  “Happens to me all the time,” Mary said, smiling. “Good conversation, good eating, and neatness do not go well together! The tie suits you well, by the way—as does your suit. Very nice, very…academic!”

  “Thanks,” I said. “I bought the outfit last time I was in England, on Savile Row.”

  “Well, you can’t go wrong with a Harris Tweed, you know—keeps you warm in winter, lets you breathe in summer. Perfect for a professor!”

  I laughed. “I do teach a course once every few years…”

  “You’re not a professor? Oh, sorry, of course, you told me. My short term memory isn’t what it used to be, I’m afraid. You’re a forensic detective!”

  “Right, but that’s OK—I like to think there’s at least a modicum of scholarship sometimes involved in my work.”

  Mary smiled and dug into her veal.

  I fingered my tie. “Mary, are Jacquard Looms still used? Could you tell if this tie and this suit were made on Jacquard machines?”

  She looked up. “Oh no. Today’s looms are all power models. They operate on the same general principles of the Jacquard, mind you, but they project the…the code, as you put it, in different ways.”

  “Hmmm…” Something occurred to me. “Do you suppose someone knowledgeable in all of this—like you—might be able to take apart a tie, or any woven cloth, and from that weave deduce the exact perforations on the cards that wove that cloth, that pattern, into being?”

  “You mean, like reverse engineering?” Mary asked. “My grandson spent some time in Japan—just came home last month. And he was telling me—that’s how they got the jump on the West over there after the Second World War! They take a piece of our technology, take it apart so they see how it works, then build something that does the same thing, but better, and without violating our copyrights—”

  “Our patents—”

  “Yes, our patents. But, yes, I suppose it might be possible to deduce the card pattern from the weave—but wouldn’t it be easier just to consult the patterns in the cards, and see what matches up best to the weave?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “But I was thinking about maybe ancient kinds of weaves in which the cards, if they even existed as cards in the first place, were no longer available. So all we had we were the weaves, the results of the code, to work with…”

  “Oh, I see what you’re saying,” Mary said, and finished the last of her veal. “That would be like DNA, in a way, wouldn’t it? There was a marvelous program on the BBC just last month about the human genome project. And they made the point that we have the results of the human genetic code all around us—in what we all look like, how we behave, and so forth—but we don’t fully understand the code as yet at all…”

  EVIDENCE…INFORMATION…MESSAGES…these were the stock-in-trade of my forensic profession. Or, at least, finding them in unlikely places…being spoken to by faces that didn’t look like faces were supposed to look…

  Some people called the homicide detective a speaker for the dead. But my profession was actually a little different: I was a listener for the dead…a listener for the message that the dead might have communicated, a scout for the sign that the unprepared eye might well miss…

  Messages came in different forms. There were the Tocharian manuscripts—messages deliberately left for someone, if not us—for why else would any human being, any intelligent entity, ever choose to write, if not to leave a message for someone else?

  The DNA in everyone, all life, of course also contained messages—code in the form of formulae for constructing a living organism, to live and behave this way or that. Of course, those messages were presumably un
intended—though, jeez, I’d had my share of run-ins with nasty messages in the nucleotides that were quite explicit. But who knows what messages the breeders of prehistoric times intended their plants and animals to convey? Of course, who could even know with assurance the degree to which there was deliberate breeding in prehistory—how far back, and by whom? With mutable life as its only marker, the record is by definition unstable…

  So Tocharian manuscripts, DNA itself, all perhaps had relevance to what had been going on—all perhaps had some message or messages relevant to a virus-like thing that caused death, mangled carbon-dating, made some of its victims look like Neanderthals…an insane illness that seemed to violate the laws of physics as well as biology—an illness that silk seemed in some way to shield against, even cure.

  And there was Lum’s theory about the Bombycidae sequences in all of us—which seemed in line, at least somewhat, with John Lapp’s talk about building blocks and blocking agents. Let’s say, as a working hypothesis, that Neanderthal DNA lacked the Bombycidae—its appearance in the human genome coincides with, maybe even causes, the rise of Cro-Magnons. The Neanderthals, nearly exterminated by the Cro-Magnons, fight back with some kind of illness that undermines the Bombycidae, and turns its victims back into Neanderthals. Cro-Magnons—Homo sapiens sapiens—come to prize silk, derived from the Bombyx mori relative of the Bombycidae, because its application either guards against the illness, or restores some aspects of the Bombycidae…

  Still a lot of conjecture, and very little evidence. A clear, unambiguous Neanderthal genome would be the best way to test it—but we had none. And there were still lots of questions. Why did the virus not only turn its victims into Neanderthals, but kill them? How widespread was it?

  The only way we could make progress in this was to proceed step by small step…

  I explained most of this to Mallory the next day, and suggested the next little object of our scrutiny.

  “You think the answer lies in a bleeding blue handkerchief?” he exclaimed.

  “I’m not saying the complete answer is there, no. I’m saying we need to look at it more carefully. We overlooked an important source of possible information here. The very weave in that handkerchief could contain a piece of this puzzle—silk was woven for two centuries with computer punch cards, for crissakes! It’s all information—DNA, writing, weave patterns, any of those could contain a message for us.”

  “Silk’s not the only fabric that’s woven,” Mallory countered. “Why not examine every cotton hanky that someone mopped his brow with?”

  “Because silk’s the thing that’s been rubbing against this case from the very beginning,” I replied. “The blue hanky we found on the first corpse in New York was silk. Antonescu has an obsession with silk—as well he should, since it seems to cure the damn Neanderthal-death virus, or whatever it is. The Amish put great stock in it too—”

  “Our mummy at the LSE and the corpse in Toronto had no silk hankies,” Mallory said.

  “Makes my hunch even stronger,” I said. “I’m beginning to think London and Toronto were red herrings—designed to throw us off, by whoever or whatever is behind this. New York’s had most of the action since the beginning, you’ve been saying so yourself—”

  “Two people were killed in Toronto, and they still haven’t found Gerry’s body.”

  “True,” I said. “But even so. No corpse has come back to life in Toronto or London. No real live Neanderthal who says his birthday cake has three hundred candles has appeared any place other than New York. And we’re also the city with the silk hanky on the corpse.”

  “OK.” Mallory put his hands up. “Have the hanky examined. Do you even know how to decode it, if it does contain a message you can retrieve from the pattern?”

  “No,” I admitted. “But I’m working on it. Mrs. Marple’s willing to help out, and she seems to have written the book on silk weaving and Jacquard looms—”

  “Mrs. Marple?”

  I smiled. “Yeah, Mary Radcliff. She’s a sweetheart—”

  “OK,” Mallory said again. “Have fun—me, I’ll stick with Pedro and the Tocharians, if it’s OK with you, and see what else I can debrief from Amanda when she’s up to it.”

  I GOT THE call from Herby in my hotel room the next morning—afternoon, his time.

  “What the hell do you mean, it’s missing?” I demanded.

  “Happens sometimes, you know that,” Herby replied. “The way the case had been going, that hanky wasn’t a high priority item. You know how it is. Nobody said anything about it for months. With Dave gone, I shifted around a few of the workers—these kinds of things happen. Someone likely walked off with it, is all—maybe one of Dave’s guys wanted a souvenir.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Take it easy, Phil. I’m checking into it—we may come up with it. We have names and addresses of everyone who had access to that evidence room.”

  “You shouldn’t have let it disappear in the first place,” I said. “Goddamnit, things are finally beginning to come together a little now, and you lose the fucking hanky!”

  “Just a second, Phil. I don’t blame you for being upset, but please don’t make unwarranted assumptions here. When was the last time you saw the hanky?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Exactly. So, for all we know, it might well have gone walking on Dave Spencer’s watch.”

  “Dave was more careful than that,” I said.

  “I’ll pretend you didn’t say that,” Herby said, though the edge in his voice showed that he wasn’t too good at pretending. “So, what else did you come up with in England other than this handkerchief idea?”

  “The handkerchief is pretty much it,” I said. “We’re making a little progress on the Tocharian manuscripts.”

  “I see,” Herby said. “I think it’s probably getting to that time when you should be heading home now.”

  “That’s not your decision.”

  “That so? Check with Dugan. He’ll tell you he told me to tell you, if you and I happened to talk before you and he, that he wants you back here—now. In fact, he asked me to help with the arrangements. You know Jack, he shies away from confrontation. So let’s see…we can book you a flight on a plane tomorrow—no wait, there’s some special deal if you stay over the weekend. All right—how does Monday sound?”

  I CALLED JENNA right after I hung up on Herby.

  “Jerk,” she said. “OK, I’ll call you right back.”

  She called me back 20 minutes later.

  “He’s missing,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Ruth Delany isn’t at work either. The best I could get from some other librarian there is that Delany is on vacation, and this one doesn’t know where Antonescu is. She’s going to check.”

  “Goddamn it,” I said. “Whoever’s behind this always seems to know what we’re doing. The silk hanky’s missing; Antonescu’s the logical person to consult; now he’s goddamn missing too!” I punched the pillow on my bed. “Better call Jack Dugan on this and report Antonescu missing. You have his number?”

  “Yeah,” Jenna said. “What about Herby?”

  “The hell with Herby. Just call Jack—I’m going over to see Mallory.”

  “OK,” Jenna said. “Oh—I forgot to tell you with all the commotion. The MIT people called with a preliminary on Amanda’s sister’s DNA. You were right that there’s something there—she’s 22 on the Paabo scale.”

  I BARGED INTO Mallory’s office.

  He was on the phone. He looked up at me. “Righto,” he said into the phone. “I’ll ring you up later. You get some sleep.” I could just tell by the tone of his voice and the way he looked at me that he had been talking to Amanda.

  “That was Amanda,” he said to me. “She confirms that John Lapp gave her the silk phosphate, and her feeling is there was nothing wrong with it. No word yet from tox screen—”

  “I don’t give a shit about the phosphate now,” I said. “There are two other thin
gs we need to talk about.”

  Mallory looked somewhat stunned.

  “One, the hanky’s missing, and so is Stefan Antonescu. You have anything to say about that?” I barked at him.

  “Jesus, again?” Mallory exclaimed, now looking incredulous. “We’re goddamn back at the bloody beginning!”

  “Right.” He was convincing, I’d say that for him. “You ever give any thought about a career in acting? You do shocked surprise very well.”

  “You think I had something to do with this?”

  “No one other than you and Jenna knew about my interest in the hanky. Did you tell anyone?”

  “No one,” Mallory insisted. “Except, of course, Amanda…”

  I smiled, without pleasure. “Ah, sweet Amanda. That’s the second thing I wanted to mention to you. Did you know that her DNA differs from ours—Homo sapiens sapiens—in twenty-two positions? Humans differ among themselves on an average of seven positions, and humans from Neanderthals on twenty-seven.”

  Mallory looked at me. “What in bleeding hell did your NYPD do? Take a snatch of her skin from her crotch in that damned hotel in New York?”

  “No, we don’t operate like that.”

  Mallory muttered a string of vivid Cockney curses.

  “Thank you,” I said. “I’m complimented. But the point still is: Did you know that about Amanda?… Of course you did, I can see it in your face…”

  Mallory said nothing.

  “How did she hide it?” I asked. “She is beautiful, no doubt about it. Her sister’s nice too—I actually got the DNA from her.” No need to keep that facet of this a secret.

  “Plastic surgery can do miracles,” Mallory finally said. “She and her sister come from a lot of money—our plastic surgeons are quite talented.”

  “But the bone structure—”

  “Proves that not all Neanderthals have that bone structure, I guess. Or perhaps her mixture of genes gave her the more petite structure. I suspect if you examine her genes more thoroughly you may even find some of that Bombycidae you’re so keen about—she certainly has loads of silk in her flat. Hell, for all I know, she looked lovely to begin with, and the plastic surgery was just to alter her nose. All I know is that she told me she’d had it, about ten years ago.”