The Silk Code

by Paul Levinson

  “Wouldn’t mind a little trip like that myself,” I said.

  “Ain’t it the truth? So I wished him a good time—but I told him to call you—and that nice Amish boy who’s come around here a few times too.”

  “Amos Stoltzfus?”

  “That’s right,” Ruth said.

  “And what did Stefan say when you said he should call Amos?”

  “He laughed in that way of his and said didn’t I know that Amish don’t use phones. And then he said he was fresh out of stray cats and butterflies. But I didn’t pay that any attention—Stefan always says things I don’t understand.”

  “Like that old joke about what happens when you cross a mafioso with a semiotician—they make you an offer you can’t understand.”

  “Oh, Doctor!” Ruth said, and chuckled heartily.

  “I wish Stefan had called me,” I said.

  “You think some harm’s come to him? You were wrong last time, thank the Lord, remember?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Wait—I tell you what. Stefan left me the key to his apartment—he has some snake plants there. They can go a long time without water, but I promised him I would come over and give them a drink if the heat really got brutal. It can do that sometimes, you know—August is a tricky month—”

  “Jeez, you have the key! I mean, sorry for the profanity—”

  “Oh, that’s OK Dr. D’Amato, I’ve heard far worse than that in my day—”

  “I mean, last time we talked about Stefan, you didn’t even have an address for him. He give me an address later on Patchin Place—is that the one he gave you the key for?”

  “Yes, it is—right off Sixth Avenue—about a five minute walk from here.”

  “I’ll be right down.”

  TWENTY

  I talked Ruth Delany into accompanying me to Stefan’s apartment. Without her, I might have needed a search warrant, and that meant contacting Jack Dugan, and I wasn’t in the mood for more advice…

  I just prayed I wasn’t getting her into anything that could result in her harm. But if Stefan was a victim in this, and the killers were completists, she was likely already in their sights…

  “Pretty exclusive, this Patchin Place,” I said, “I’m surprised Stefan could afford it, on a janitor’s salary.”

  “I think it’s a friend’s place,” she said, “someone letting him stay over.”

  “Ah, that would explain it. How long he has he been staying here?”

  “I don’t know,” Ruth replied. “I can’t recall his saying.” She put the key in the wrought-iron gate in front of the street—really more of a classic mews, a little alleyway with flower pots dappling every entrance and window sill. “This should work here,” she said. It did.

  We walked quickly to the third set of stairs, all of which were on the right. An Irish terrier pulled a man with bushy white hair out of the door and down the stairs. He smiled at us as the terrier pulled him out of Patchin Place entirely…

  I hustled up the stairs, with Ruth in tow.

  “OK, here it is.”

  Stefan’s apartment was on the second floor. I rapped sharply on the door. And then again.

  I looked at Ruth.

  “I guess no one’s home,” she said. “Feels a mite hot and dry today, wouldn’t you agree, Dr. D’Amato? I’d say the snake plants could definitely use a bit of watering.”

  I knew I liked this woman, from the moment I first saw her—not your typical by-the-book librarian by any means.

  The apartment didn’t seem exceptional at first glance—a couch and a chair in some earthen fabric that looked well sat in, a nice wooden hutch, probably oak, with art nouveau carving. Lots of stuff like that in the Village. There seemed to be a bathroom off to one side, a kitchen on the other. No bedroom—likely the couch was a convertible. I looked more closely and saw that it was…

  And a bright sunny window sill indeed had not only snake plants but a few pots of spider plants hanging from the ceiling. Ruth walked over and touched the soils of the botanic menagerie. “They’re dry, all right,” she said. “These plants make an honest woman out of me!”

  I began a closer inspection of the apartment. No prescription medication in the medicine chest—nothing at all with a name or an expiration date. Just some bars of soap, and about a dozen bottles of cologne, most of them nearly full. I opened one—English Leather—and sniffed carefully to verify the contents. Ah, sweet memories of splashing too much on my face as I hurried to pick up Denise Yablon that last weekend in high school… It was English Leather, no doubt about that.

  I went into the kitchen. The refrigerator had lots of gallon bottles of Poland Spring, and that was it. Again, nothing with an expiration date—nothing I could use to figure out when a human being had last been here. Except—how long had Poland Spring been available like this? What, ten, twenty, thirty years? Did me no good at all. I was beginning to see a pattern here, and I didn’t like it.

  “Dr. D’Amato, look at this,” Ruth called to me from the living room.

  She had what looked like an old 78-rpm vinyl in her hand—they’d stopped making those kinds of records, what, in the 1940s? The label was worn. The printing on it was barely legible…

  “Looks like Cyrillic,” Ruth said. “Stefan’s from Romania…”

  “He told me Hungary,” I said. “But Antonescu’s certainly a Romanian name, and there must have been Romanians in Hungarian territory over the years—the two countries are right next to each other.” For that matter, the Hungarian language was a relative of Finnish, if I remembered correctly—a non-Indo-European language like Basque. Talk about tangled webs…“The Romanian alphabet is Latin, though, not Cyrillic,” I added.

  “It’s all so confusing,” Ruth said. “I wonder what this record sounds like.”

  “Would be great if there were an old Victrola around here somewhere—where’d you find the record?”

  She pointed to behind the hutch. “I saw it peeking out,” she said. “It’s very dusty back there.”

  “Yeah, Antonescu, or whoever lived here then, probably let it slip away when packing. Who knows how long ago that even was.”

  “No sign that Stefan’s ever been here at all,” Ruth declared.

  “My feeling exactly,” I said.

  “What does that mean? Why would he lie to me about this, and go through all the trouble of giving me his key, and urging me to come here? Makes no sense.”

  Welcome to almost everything else I’d encountered since I’d first seen the corpse that Dave Spencer thought was Stefan Antonescu…

  “Could be he’s not lying,” I said. “Maybe someone got here first…”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe whoever’s responsible for the murders. Someone who doesn’t like Neanderthals—someone who doesn’t like us—maybe both. I’ll interview the neighbors here, and see what—”

  The phone in my pocket rang.

  Had to be Jenna.

  It was.

  “OK, I’ll call you right back.” I threw her a kiss, pressed “End” on the phone, and then realized that Ruth was smiling at me.

  “We might as well go—I don’t think we’ll find much else here,” I said, and grabbed a glass from the kitchen with my gloved hand. Possibly it had a fingerprint or recoverable DNA.

  Ruth had the 78 record. “Should I take it back to the Library? We may have a record player squirreled away in some room there that can play this.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Here’s my private cell-phone number. Call me right away if you hear anything interesting. And I’ll call you if I find out anything more about Stefan.”

  I WAVED GOODBYE to Ruth, and called Jenna right back on the phone. “First thing is, you’re OK? Nothing strange going on outside the apartment?”

  “I’m fine,” Jenna said. “There’s a cute guy in a uniform right outside my door, another patrolman right outside on the street—what more could I ask for?”

  “Thanks, that makes me feel much
better now,” I quipped, glad to have any excuse to cut the tension even a little. “So tell me about Bonnie’s new translation.”

  “She said you should call her about it later—she was up with it all night, and needed a nap. But she gave me what she had.”

  “OK,” I said.

  “It has to do with singers and killers, and some sort of warning about children—assuming we take it literally,” Jenna said. “Remember the segment that Pedro translated—it ended with illness it has bestowed upon us and the children like a curse? Well, first of all, Bonnie says Pedro was able to do some more work on the oxidized part, and recover a few more words that Bonnie translated as—”

  “Why don’t you read the whole thing to me—with the original and then the additional wording?”

  “OK,” Jenna said. “The original was: Our ancestors must have been jealous of the singers, for they killed most of them. Not because they were ugly, but because their minds were beautiful, and more knowing than ours. Their intelligence must have frightened our forebears, far more than their faces. Our forebears bred precautions, but the blood of the singers had its revenge, in the illness it has bestowed upon us and the children like a curse. That’s where the initial translation ended. But now Bonnie says there is no period after curse—Pedro just put that in there because it looked as if the sentence was finished. And there are additional words in the manuscript after curse, and the part with the children was apparently initially translated out of place, so… Here, let me read the relevant part as Bonnie now has it: but the blood of the singers had its revenge, in the illness it has bestowed upon us like a curse and the children it has set to walk among us like men.”

  “Hmm… So in this new translation, the children are not the target but the vehicle of the revenge…victims to victors… But what was does walk among us like men mean?”

  “I don’t know,” Jenna said. “Bonnie also has an alternate translation for the last phrase—more metaphoric—in the illness it has bestowed upon us like a curse and the caterpillars it has set to fly among us like butterflies…”

  “Hmmm…” I said.

  “I know,” Jenna said. “Silk worms again…”

  “Except this time the moths seem to be bad guys…or maybe the bad guys make use of them too. But how could the same word mean either ‘children’ or ‘caterpillars’?” I asked.

  “Bonnie says it’s a question of context. The word apparently does mean ‘caterpillars,’ but when taken as part of the overall passage it seems to be an allusion to children. The problem is there aren’t enough unambiguous words in the documents to be sure.”

  “How come Pedro made the mistake with the placement of ‘children’ in that sentence in the first place?” I asked.

  “Those kinds of transpositions happen in translations all the time—think about word orders in Latin,” Jenna said. “It’s really hard when you have so little of the language to work with. The better word order became clear to Bonnie only after Pedro translated the rest of the sentence—it has set to walk among us like men. I suppose a curse could ‘walk among us like men’ too, but ‘children’ works much better there, even though we still can’t tell exactly what it means.”

  “Has Bonnie figured out anything more about a specific author for this yet? Any indication of age, gender—name?” And species?

  “She can’t tell completely yet,” Jenna replied. “The most she’s been able to glean, so far, is that the writer had lived a long life—by whatever the contemporary Tocharian standards were, of course—and makes references here and there, in otherwise untranslated parts of the manuscripts, to having traveled far and wide in the world. We can’t even be sure it’s all the same writer—though I asked Bonnie about that, and she says if she had to bet she’d say it was.”

  “So here are these manuscripts waiting thirteen hundred years in the Tarim Basin, maybe with answers to some of our questions, and we finally have them in our hands now, but we still can’t fathom what they’re trying to tell us—or even who is trying to tell us,” I said.

  “Like everything else we seem to be dealing with here—right in front of us, but we still can’t see exactly what we’re looking at,” Jenna said. “But Bonnie’s still working on it. She’s good. She’ll get more.”

  “All right. If you speak to her before I do, tell her to keep in close touch with you, and I will too. And be careful—you know the drill. Don’t go out anywhere without an escort—better, don’t go out at all—and stay away from windows…”

  “Yeah, yeah, I’ll be careful. I love you.”

  “I love you too,” I said, and beeped off the phone.

  The man with the bushy white hair opened the gate—I’d been standing right inside of it.

  I described Stefan to him, and asked if he recalled the last time he’d seen him.

  Never, he said, he couldn’t remember ever seeing anyone around here who looked like Stefan.

  “But there was an Amish boy here just this morning,” he added, “and he asked me the same question.”

  A MAN IN uniform proceeded along 85th Street slowly, deliberately, but not to attract undue attention. He reached the brownstone—good, there were no cops stationed outside it.

  He walked up the stairs, smiled at a bleached-blonde lady walking down the stairs, and entered the vestibule.

  Three possible apartments.

  He rang the buzzer on the first, and most preferable.

  No answer.

  He rang it again, got the same result.

  He tried the second buzzer.

  That got no answer also.

  A woman holding a white cat opened the inside door—the one he was trying to get into—and gazed balefully at him. No special delivery for you today, lady, don’t worry.

  He was tempted to go inside, but thought the better of it. The woman passed by and out into the street. The cat’s hisses lingered in the vestibule like a bad smell.

  He rang the third bell. If that didn’t get an answer, he’d have to go back to the park, or maybe a coffee shop, wait an hour or two, and try again. This building was his only option…

  “Hello?” a female voice, crackly with static, inquired.

  “Yes, Express Mail, for… Michele Politico,” he said, moving closer to read the blurry lettering below the buzzer.

  “Polito,” she corrected him. “OK, come on up.”

  The door buzzed. He pushed it open and climbed the stairs to the third floor.

  He knocked on her door. He flashed the Express Mail envelope at the peephole.

  “OK, just a minute.” Michele opened the door a moment later. She had glistening long black hair, but it didn’t matter.

  She went down, sprayed full in the face, gasping, coughing, dead of an asthmatic reaction seven minutes later. By then he had picked up her oxygen-depleted body, and nestled it comfortably on a couch in front of a television.

  Deaths from asthma were really on the upswing these days. Maybe some researcher would draw a connection between them and watching television.

  He walked carefully to the window and looked across at the brownstone with Phil D’Amato’s apartment.

  It wasn’t the cleanest angle, but this was the best he could do.

  Their window was open. Lucky break for him. A fine beautiful August day—much less humid than usual, pollution in the city down—why use air conditioning? Good ecological thinking, Dr. D’Amato.

  He could have used a bullet to penetrate a closed window, if necessary, but that would announce this as murder. This way was better. His dart was biodegradable. The break in the skin would be so small that it likely go unnoticed. Healthy folk died of aneurysms all the time. People close to the investigation, people like Phil D’Amato who didn’t believe in coincidences, of course would know. But knowledge and proof were two different things, and with any luck, D’Amato wouldn’t be around to suspect coincidences or anything else. The silk cure wouldn’t help him this time…

  The silk cure…he had to laugh. As if
one antidote could work for everything. That BBC woman had just been very lucky—preventatives usually don’t take that quickly. But he had lots of toys in his pocket. Asthma, aneurysm…the time was long since past for catalysts that metamorphosed the body and confounded carbon datings.

  The time had passed for that, as it was passing now for him… No time left anymore for testing the prowess of his antagonists, for sowing confusion, for calling forth the snakes in them to consume their own tails… Just time for cleaning up the details…

  The wisdom of millennia said the best way of erasing knowledge was elimination of the living vessels that carried it.

  He looked at the open window. He’d get the first person who appeared there—if not Phil, then Jenna—and then he’d get Phil when he discovered Jenna’s body…

  And if no one appeared there, he’d figure out a way to get them out of the apartment.

  MY PHONE RANG. I was just finishing my third worthless interview on Patchin Place.

  I thanked the man—he said he was a “media critic”—and took the call.

  “Hi honey,” Jenna said. “I’ve got Amanda Leonard on hold on the other line. Should I make it a three-way conference call?”

  “Good idea. Easier for you to jot down any important information than for me in the street.”

  “OK, hold on,” Jenna said.

  “Hullo?” another voice said a moment later.

  “Hi Amanda. We saw you on tape last night—you were great.”

  “Thank you—is that you, Phil?”

  “Yep. Jenna’s on the line too.”

  “Great. Well, we’ve heard back from Mary Radcliff at The Silk Museum, who heard from MIT,” Amanda said. “The code in the silk hanky turned out to be snap to crack!”

  “Excellent! Tell me the whole story.”

  I heard some kind of rusty scraping. “I’m just raising the blinds a little,” Jenna said. “The sun’s gone behind a cloud…”

  “…Mary tried to derive punch cards for all three handkerchiefs,” Amanda was saying.

  “Right,” I said.

  “And only one was the product of a Jacquard Loom, or something like it. The two others were much more modern in creation, and nothing about their weave could be reduced to a code. Mary says their code is Marks and Sparks—or maybe J. C. Penney would be better.” She laughed.