“Yet you don’t sound very optimistic.” I appreciated the value of a research leader willing to pull in the reins on the wildest fantasies of the team, though personally I preferred someone who jumped on the lead horse and urged it to fly even farther.
Hertzberg grunted. “It’s the monkeys on a typewriter typing Shakespeare problem. Or maybe sticking a duck’s feet in a can of wet red paint, and having it walk across an empty canvas, is a better example. Is that art? It looks like art. But we can’t accept it as art, because we know its resemblance to art is just a coincidence. Same with the chromosome code— the fact that it looks like an Indo-European language doesn’t mean it is. Sometimes the reason that two words in very distant languages look like each other is just coincidence. If I were pushed for an assessment at this point, I’d have to say that that’s what we’re dealing with here.”
I, on the other hand, was never a big fan of coincidence. It often was a shorthand gloss, a convenient cover, for significant connections we didn’t yet understand. “But if it isn’t?”
“Look,” Hertzberg sounded like his patience was beginning to wear. “Mapping the genome is much more drudgery than the public imagines it to be. We make a connection here, trace a sequence there, but discovering what each of 300 billion nucleotides can do is a massive undertaking. So we look for relationships, for patterns of expression in the proteins. But even that is slow, slow work. Most of the breaks come from the other direction—not in studying how genes express themselves, but in anchoring an already-known expression, like an illness or a maybe a behavioral pattern, to a genetic combination. Like cystic fibrosis, or depression among some of the Amish. And the DNA outside of the genes is doubly harder to understand, because its connection to the phenotype is even more removed—we’ve got no known illnesses to tag them to.”
“Right, no confessed murders to work backwards from,” I said.
“What?”
“Just thinking out loud,” I said, “Tell me more about the words on the screen. What’d they say?”
“Well, so far, Klein’s the only one who’s claimed to have actually produced them on the screen. Chaleff was a good worker, but no genius, and if you want my appraisal I’d say he was exaggerating when he told Jenna—”
“Klein? Who’s Klein?” I asked.
“Manny Klein—Emmanuel Klein,” Hertzberg replied. “He’s the one who started this special part of the genome project rolling. He discovered the odd chromosomal material two years ago, made the first transformations into binary, and said he eventually got some text up on his screen.”
“You don’t believe him?”
“Well—”
“Never mind,” I said. No point in going over that ground again. “What did the text actually say?”
“Some kind of history lesson,” Hertzberg said. “It wasn’t gibberish, but it didn’t make much sense. Even had a copyright notice at the end,” Hertzberg laughed. “That’s why, to be thoroughly frank with you, I keep emphasizing that I have serious doubts that this project will ever pan out. Seems to me a much more likely explanation for what Manny saw on his screen is that his computer somehow dumped some text from another file into what he was working on. It’s happened to me from time to time—I once found part of a very personal letter I had written months earlier right in the middle of a grant proposal I was about to print out and FedEx. Damn good thing I caught it in time—”
“I can imagine,” I said. “Where can I get in touch with Klein?”
“You can’t,” Hertzberg said. He paused for a long second, then spoke in a much lower tone of voice. “Look, I know what you’ll be thinking when I tell you this. But believe me, the stroke was entirely natural—Manny had a long history of them. And the one he got after discovering this chromosome material was, well, very big. He was out like a light. Seventy-one is too young to die these days, but at least he had a satisfying life.”
Hertzberg was right about what I was thinking. A death of one young scientist and I guess I had to go with the lieutenant: it was most likely murder. The death of two scientists, both working on the same project: jeez, I’d been down twisted paths like that before.
Prospects for Jenna Katen suddenly were looking up.
I couldn’t say the same for the rest of the world.
“All right. Who can I speak to for more information about Klein?”
“Jenna’s your best bet,” Hertzberg answered. “She was Manny’s research assistant.”
Short-lived reprieve for Jenna. The fickle scales of probability were tipping against her again.
I’ve always found Neapolitan food to be good accompaniment to the resolution of crises. But I wasn’t there yet, not by a long shot. I didn’t know enough. I invited Jenna to lunch at Taste of Tokyo in the Village.
I noticed more of her eyes this time. They were an absolutely alluring shade of green with flecks of violet. Lucky would be the guy who saw to it that the DNA for those eyes made it into the next generation. But I had more important things to think about right now.
“Glen didn’t die of old-fashioned natural causes,” Jenna said.
“We agree,” I said. “Death by natural causes is a process—like Michael Baden says—you see a history, however subtle, of body breakdown that leads to the circumstances of death. Even in heart attacks and strokes. We found no history like that in Glen. Something else was at work there.”
“Who’s Michael Baden?” Jenna asked.
“Used to be Chief Medical Examiner in New York City. Testified in the O.J. trial.”
“But I didn’t kill Glen,” Jenna said.
“Well, that’s the part that, to be straight with you, we’re not as convinced about. If Glen didn’t die of natural causes—if the breakdown of just about every major system in his body was triggered by something unnatural, as it almost certainly had to have been—then the cause of death was accident, suicide, or homicide. There are no other choices. We have no evidence, really, that any one of those three more likely happened than the others. But the guy is dead. You were in the room with him. That moves the needle just a bit into the murder part of the meter, with your shade of lipstick, as they say.”
Jenna sipped her green tea. I could see her lips quivering around the edges of the hot cup. They had no lipstick on them. Just soft and pink. “I didn’t say Glen didn’t die of natural causes,” she said.
“But—”
“I said he didn’t die of old-fashioned natural causes,” she said.
“Meaning?” I asked.
“I tried to tell you in your office on Tuesday,” she said. “Somehow the words on the screen killed him. The words that came from the chromosomal material. I’m not sure how—but that’s about as natural a cause of death as you can get—death by DNA, or more accurately, by transformed DNA-algorithms on a screen.”
“Is that what killed Emmanuel Klein?”
She blanched. “He wasn’t a young man. Everyone says he died of a stroke.”
“What do you say?”
She took another sip of the tea, sucked down a gulp. “He died of the same thing as Glen,” she said very quietly.
“And you were there both times— or at least working, or involved, with both of them, right?”
She didn’t answer.
“Look, you seem like an intelligent, sensitive person. I want to help you— I want to believe you. But you’ve got to be more open with me. On the face of it, you’re in a bad position here. You have a connection with two people who died—one mysteriously, maybe the other mysteriously too. Cops don’t like coincidences—they’re like red flags to us. There’s a common denominator here. And I think you know it.”