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Some conspiracy theories are right—but not in the way their proponents think.
You sweat in a suit in Palm Beach, even in February, so I had the air on max in the rented Buick. At a traffic light I took another pull on the Starbucks in the cup-holder and caught my eyes in the rearview mirror. Dark circles and bloodshot. I’d been in a card game that broke up at dawn and had just time to shave and shower the cigarette smoke out of my hair. Somehow, I had remembered how to tie a Windsor knot.
Traffic was light on the drive up from Miami—it was Saturday and anybody with sense or money was home in bed. I pulled into a service station and checked myself out in the mirror in the john. Brooks Brothers dark pinstripe, white shirt, gold cufflinks, red and green striped tie, red lapel handkerchief. You’ll pass, you asshole, I thought. But you had to wait until Romero and Vargas cleaned out your last hundred. When are you going to learn to fold? This could be big, and you almost blew it for a poker game. I splashed some water on my face and popped a handful of breath mints. Roderick had said eight. I would actually be early.
I drove around the shopping district past a lot of exclusive “high end” shops with their lights still off and their alarm systems armed, ignoring the sensuous voice of the GPS on the dash. At 7:50 I decided I’d killed enough time and swung down La Brea as directed. It wasn’t long before the scenery started shouting “MONEY” in big letters: monogrammed gates with intercoms and video cameras, ten-foot walls topped with spikes or razor wire. It was the kind of neighborhood that greeted you with an implied “Who are you and how did you get my address?” Roderick’s money came from real estate, but not this sort, unless it was a minor sideline. A hasty internet check when I had gotten the call listed him as a mogul of shopping malls and industrial parks. Around a sweeping curve of manicured date palms I caught sight of the marina, straight ahead with the Atlantic and a glaring morning sun behind it.
T. Jason Roderick’s yacht, the Snark II, was a 100-foot monster with a two-seat helicopter perched on a pad on its bow. A radar antenna was rotating on the roof of its forward cabin. I parked in one of the reserved spaces. As I was getting out of the car, I was confronted by two armed guards in identical beige shorts and monogrammed golf shirts. One asked for ID while the other murmured into a cell phone. Tweedle Dum stared at my Florida drivers license then squinted at my face. “Mr. Sanko?” Yeah, it had been Sanchez, Caesar Sanchez, once upon a time. But now it was legally Charlie Sanko because even today 500 million bucks doesn’t hire a private investigator named Caesar Sanchez. This sandy-haired creep was looking at me like he smelled something bad so I snatched back my license.
“Roderick’s having me review his security,” I said, stooping to focus on his nametag.
“He’s expecting you, sir,” he said, donning a paste-on smile. “Please follow me.”
Roderick was in a deck chair in a white robe and sandals. Tanned like old leather with thinning white hair, he might have been sixty, but he looked like it had been sixty miles of bad road. Or was it just the contrast to the leggy girl next to him—twenty-something, blonde, in an expensive one-piece—who peered at me over her sunglasses?
“Mr. Sanko, please sit down, “ Roderick said, nodding at the next chair in a line of half a dozen. “Marta, Mr. Sanko and I have some business to discuss. Why don’t you dial up a movie or something?”
Without a word Marta unfolded herself fetchingly from the chair and sauntered away.
Roderick turned to me, his deeply tanned furrows contrasted with a cold gray stare. “Now then, Mr. Sanko, I have a problem of a rather delicate nature and I have it from several sources that your methods are thorough and discreet.”
That wouldn’t have been my staple of marital infidelity cases he was talking about. Any PI with a digital camera makes his living with those. It might have been the Anderson Amusements International case—I’d saved their asses from a fraudulent damage claim. Or maybe it was some of those wash-and-wear banks—I’d done some laundry work for a couple that I wasn’t particularly proud of. I just sat back and gave Roderick a non-committal smile.
“I have a daughter, Mr. Sanko. Pamela. She is twenty-five-years old and has a PhD in theoretical chemistry from Yale.” Roderick produced a large cigar case and offered it to me. Illegal Cuban Cohibas in glass tubes. I took one and pocketed it. “Thanks,” I said, “I’ll save it.”
He shrugged and uncorked one for himself, slicing the end with a gold cigar cutter. “Pamela had the world by the ass,” Roderick continued. “She is smart and beautiful. A business associate of mine was prepared to offer her a position in his firm that would lead to vice president of research and development. Who knows how far she could have gone after that . . . ?” Roderick rolled the cigar end in a lighter’s flame, then puffed leisurely. “Several universities offered her faculty positions. But she let it all go . . . to write this drivel.” He reached under his chair and produced a hardbound book. The dust jacket showed one of those blurry photographs of a disk-shaped UFO, like a patty-pan squash, in the sky above a cornfield with a crowd of incredulous on-lookers in denim work clothes in the foreground. Are We Ready, it was titled. I turned it over. On the back was a picture of Pamela Roderick. Her daddy was right; she was a looker—reddish-brown shoulder-length hair, perfect teeth just visible between full lips, and green eyes canopied by long dark lashes.
Roderick blew a cloud of smoke that hovered a moment, then was caught by an ocean gust. “She takes after her mother,” he said. “You never knew what she was up to.”
“You are . . .”
“Divorced. She took up with a second-rate actor. Prenup saved me a bundle.”
I began paging through the book. It didn’t seem to be at all like your stereotypical lunatic fringe opus. After a few minutes I realized that it didn’t fit the mold even remotely. The chapter titles alone suggested something very different: “Contact: Apotheosis or Anomie?”; “The Conquistador Model”; “The Proselytizing Model”; “Deconstructing Social Paradigms.” I turned back to the Introduction, opened it at random and began to read:
Unless a contact event—whatever form it may take—is preceded by an informed dialectic that analyzes the complete social consequences of all likely scenarios, mankind is certain to experience a bouleversement of an unprecedented scale. It is striking that no serious discussions to prepare the human race for what most thoughtful people regard as an inevitable event have yet taken place outside the realm of science fiction. In this volume I have attempted to initiate such a colloquy by pairing projected future events involving extra-terrestrial contact with probable cultural, economic, philosophic, and religious effects in the modern world.
“It reads like a treatise in sociology,” I said.
Roderick flicked some ash on the deck. “I haven’t read the damn thing. It was on the bestseller list last year—may still be for all I know. The point is she’s dropped her career in science to become a writer.”
I started to hand the book back. “She’s a big girl now,” I said, disappointed. “I’m afraid I can’t help you.”
Roderick didn’t take the book. Instead, he reached under his chair again and handed me another. “I’m not asking you to play truant officer, Sanko. Take a look at this.”
The second book’s cover showed a detailed drawing of some weird-looking plants and a lot of writing in a fluid cursive hand, but in an alphabet I didn’t recognize. The title was superimposed in yellow: The Voynich Verdict. Pamela Roderick had co-authored it with somebody named Reggie Marsh. I flipped it over and there was Pamela with Reggie—tall and gaunt, but with a face like Tom Hanks and a hair-do like Howard Stern. I had to admit the contrast grated on me. “Charming couple,” I said.
Roderick blew a smoke ring that was quickly torn apart by the quickening breeze. “It’s not funny, Sanko.” He spat violently on the deck between our chairs. “I hear they’re engaged to be married.” He turned that gray stare at me, and I could see that he meant business. “I want to know all about this Marsh guy. He’s been influencing my daughter, and now he wants to be family. I want you to find out his angle, and then I want you to get rid of him for me.” He sat back and puffed furiously to keep the cigar alight.
I squinted at him through a cloud of smoke. “I think you got the wrong idea about me,” I said. “I’m not a hit man or a leg-breaker.”
Roderick waved the cigar. “No, no, Sanko. No violence. At least for now. I have heard good things about your resourcefulness. . . .”
I read over the second book on the flight from Miami to Kennedy. It didn’t take long to find out that it was a lot screwier than the first. Still, there was that professorial tone that gave the thing a ring of authority. It began with a plausible story:
It seems there was this Russian/American antique book dealer named Wilfrid M. Voynich. In 1912, Voynich discovered a very weird manuscript dated from the sixteenth century among a collection of old documents in an Italian villa. The item in question was a packet of 234 vellum pages profusely illustrated with crude drawings of plants that had no known counterparts on earth, with astronomical and astrological diagrams, and with pictures of nude women in a strange network of pipes and tubs. Some of the women were wearing crowns. The accompanying text was written in a language that no one in more than a century has been able to decipher.
In 1930, Voynich’s widow, Ethel Lillian Voynich, inherited the manuscript among her husband’s effects. When she died in 1960, it was left to her friend Miss Anne Nill, who sold it the next year to Hans P. Kraus, a New York-based antique book dealer, for $24,500. He attempted to sell it for his asking price of $160,000, but no one snapped it up. In 1969, he donated it to Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book Library where it currently resides as catalog number MS408.
Pamela and Reggie’s book turned the Voynich manuscript into the key plot element in an alien abduction scenario with a new twist. Apparently, a claim has been made that the Voynich pictures contain symbols suggestive of the Albingensian religious movement that had been stamped out by the Crusaders and the Inquisition three centuries prior to the presumed date of the document. According to Pam and Reggie, in the 1230s, when the religious crusade against the Cathari (as they were called) was at its peak, a few hundred of the fleeing heretics were rescued from the Languedoc region of France by one or more alien space ships. The earthlings, men and women, were transported to the aliens’ home planet in another star system, where they were culturally assimilated. In the sixteenth century, after about fifteen generations of life on the alien world, a few of the descendants of the rescued Cathari were returned to earth. By then the furor over their forebears’ beliefs had been forgotten, but the returned Cathari were understandably cautious and secretive. Pamela and Reggie claimed that the Voynich manuscript was the record of their life on the alien world.
The stewardess sold me a can of beer and plopped down two small bags of pretzels on the service tray. I sipped and munched through part of a chapter on that strange alphabetic text. Apparently, linguists and code-breakers have been working on this thing ever since Wilfrid Voynich discovered the manuscript. Nearly all the experts said that it was not gobbledy-gook, that it had the rhythm and flow of a real language. Presumably, a talented linguist could invent a convincing new language as a hoax, even in the sixteenth century, but what kind of lunatic would have the skill and patience to sustain it for 234 pages?
When we arrived at JFK, the terminal screen said that the hedgehopper to New Haven was delayed. Rather than sit it out, I found a rental booth and signed up for a Grand Marquis. It wasn’t going to be that bad of a drive. I made a spur of the moment detour to Quick Jerry’s, a print shop in Jersey City. It was run by an ex-con I knew who had spent some hard time for forgery. I was collecting on a favor he owed me. Half an hour later I picked up Interstate 95 just south of New Rochelle and headed up the Connecticut coast past Stamford, Norwalk, and Bridgeport.
A little under two hours later I was strolling the Yale campus in the center of New Haven, trying not to look out of place. I was carrying a briefcase and had donned a pair of glasses and a cardigan sweater. It was a sunny winter day but I shivered a bit from the unaccustomed chill. There were still a few melting snow-piles—vestiges of the last winter storm.
The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library contrasted sharply with the venerable limestone columns and hallowed stone and redbrick structures of the campus. It was a huge rectangular prism composed of translucent marble panels framed with granite, and it sat in the center of a quadrangle decorated with geometric abstract sculptures. Stepping inside its controlled atmosphere I was brought up short, first by the quality of the diffuse natural light from the immense array of translucent marble, then by the central book tower, six stories high. The outer walls were revealed as a giant shell encasing a steel superstructure of steps and shelves loaded with books and documents.
“May I help you, sir?” A woman’s voice. A rent-a-cop in my line of sight pointed over my left shoulder where a pretty young thing behind a large counter was motioning me over.
I let the glasses slide forward and pushed them back with my thumb. I wrinkled my nose, knitted my brow and showed some teeth like I was trying to focus on her. I was overdoing the Nutty Professor, I realized and knocked it off.
“Are you a faculty member, sir?” she asked.
“Ah, no. That is, not here. At Yale, I mean.”
“Could I see a photo ID, please?”
I made a show of fumbling in several pockets, finally producing the laminated card that Quick Jerry had run off for me. It was made out for a small mid-western university. She checked it out, entered something in a computer, handed it back, then slid over a flat-screen and stylus. “Please sign in, Professor Sanko.”
The girl gave me a bar-coded visitor’s badge, a brochure, and a map of the library. I started to walk away, then abruptly turned back. I had suddenly remembered a name from the book’s Acknowledgement page. “Oh, ah, Miss . . . You wouldn’t have a Dr. Hans Dietrich on your staff here?”
“Dr. Dietrich?” she said. “Why, yes. Let me check his schedule.” She tapped again at her keyboard. “Mm . . . Dr. Dietrich is out today. Could I have his teaching assistant, Miss Chandler, help you?”
“That would be lovely,” I said.
Ann Chandler was a cute twenty-two-year-old grad student with a honey blonde bob cut and wire-rim glasses. We were at a table in the huge reading room. Both of us were wearing white nylon gloves, and the Voynich manuscript and several boxes of related materials were opened before us.
“Dr. Dietrich wrote an article refuting the Roger Bacon authorship,” she was saying. “Would you be interested in a reprint?”
“Yes, indeed I would,” I said, “but for now I’m particularly interested in your . . . or Dr. Dietrich’s overall understanding of the background of the manuscript.” I waved my gloved hand. “Just presume that I know nothing at all about it.”
“Well,” and Miss Chandler blushed a little, “stop me if I begin boring you.”
“That you shan’t do, young lady.”
She knitted her brows. “The earliest record of it, as you probably know, dates from the court of the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II in the late sixteenth century. Someone had sold it to him for six hundred gold ducats.” She looked up and smiled. “That was an astonishing amount of money for a manuscript at that time—something like $50,000 today. But Rudolph collected oddities—giants for his army, dwarfs for his court, as well as magicians, alchemists, necromancers . . .” She caught her breath. “You must have heard about the connection with John Dee and Edward Kelley?”
I hadn’t a clue, but I liked her youthful enthusiasm. What I said was: “Of course, but it’s always helpful to hear a fresh take on the facts.”
Ann Chandler took that as a green light to really open up and demonstrate her knowledge. “Well, John Dee was likely a sincere humbug who believed himself to be a great sorcerer. He was Queen Elizabeth’s astrologer and she consulted him from time to time throughout her reign. Kelley, on the other hand, was clearly a charlatan who duped many people, including Dee. They first met when Kelley appeared at Dee’s door wearing a skullcap to conceal the fact that he had lost his ears in punishment for forgery. Kelley duped Dee, convincing him that he was a sensitive, a ‘scrier’ as they called it, who could channel with the angels and the dead. He also claimed to have a powder that converted base metals into gold.
“Dee and Kelley teamed up and traveled with their wives across Europe in the 1580s, demonstrating their arcane talents. At one point Kelley actually convinced Dee that a spirit wanted them to share each other’s conjugal beds.” I expected a blush at this, but Anne Chandler just smiled coyly. “It was natural that they gravitated to Rudolph, who loved anything occult. Kelley had already invented a language, Enochian, that he claimed his angel contacts spoke in heaven, so some people think that he also invented the language of the Voynich manuscript. Dee, on the other hand, was an expert on the works of Roger Bacon. And so it’s a short stretch to imagine that Kelley and Dee sold the manuscript to Rudolph, representing it as a newly discovered text written by Roger Bacon. Dee may even have believed it himself.”
I turned a few pages carefully with a gloved hand, feigning interest in the curlicues of the text and the crude colored drawings. “I suppose,” I said, “the main question is: was Kelley capable of such a sustained effort?”
The girl nodded enthusiastically. “It’s a major question. The Voynich text is the biggest mystery in historical cryptology. It’s been scrutinized by dozens of professional and amateur code-breakers and linguists over the last century. No one has even been able to prove definitely whether it’s a code or a language. Subjectively, the text looks like a cursive alphabetic language, written from left to right. There are no obvious corrections or erasures. The fluid cursive style suggests that the writer did not have to stop and look up or calculate the next letter.”
She produced a folder. “I brought along some notes,” she said. “There are approximately 170,000 glyphs or ‘letters,’ spaced to form about 35,000 words,” she read. “The ‘alphabet’ consists of somewhere between twenty and thirty characters, depending on one’s guess as to what constitutes a letter. Some glyphs are only found at the start of words, some only in the middle, and some only at the end. There are almost no words composed of more than ten glyphs and very few one—and two-glyph words. There are a large number of repeats and sequences of words that differ by only one glyph. Words that appear to be figure titles seldom recur elsewhere.”
Ann Chandler looked up from the folder notes. “Is this the sort of information you were looking for?”
“Please go on,” I said.
“A statistical treatment of the text showed that word frequency followed Zipf’s Law.” She looked up. “All that means is that, just as in all known languages, a few words like ‘the’ and ‘and’ occur with a high frequency, while most words are rare and the tail-off is steep. The word entropy is similar to that of English and Latin.”
“Word entropy?” I said. “That sounds familiar.”
The girl shrugged. “I had to look it up. It comes out of Claude Shannon’s work on information theory. Apparently information and thermodynamics are deeply connected. In fact it’s been suggested that thermodynamic entropy is a special case of information entropy. Are you familiar with the TV game show Wheel of Fortune? Well, there you have a sequence of blanks and spaces and you guess letters to identify a phrase or title. Each letter that you guess correctly gives you a bit of information about the puzzle. Assuming you are the only player, if you would total up all your wrong guesses as bits, the information entropy of the puzzle is the total number of bits needed to use to solve it.” She caught her breath and continued. “Actually, that’s single character entropy. But in all known alphabetic languages the characters are not independent of each other. If Vanna turns over a ‘q’ you know the next letter is a ‘u’—that’s richer information. There are hundreds of similar clues—a ‘th’ is always followed by an ‘r’ or a vowel, for instance. They call that second-order entropy. The Voynich manuscript’s word entropy has been estimated as ten bits per word, which is similar to the value for English.”
She stopped and looked up at me. “Am I going on too long, Professor Sanko? It’s one of my favorite topics. I wasn’t sure just where your interest lies.”
I adjusted my glasses with a gloved hand. “Well, ah, Miss Chandler, perhaps we can put away this remarkable document and discuss the subject further over a cup of coffee?”
The warmth of the coffee shop and the coffee took some of the library’s humid chill out of me, and the clink of plates and the murmur of conversation were a nice contrast to the austere hush of the Beinecke. Ann Chandler was a nice person, I decided, but I couldn’t help wondering what she was like when she let her hair down. I was listening to her talk as I spread cream cheese on a bagel.
“Many believe that even a resourceful forger and mountebank like Kelley would be incapable of producing the Voynich. In 2003, Gordon Rugg from Keele University in Britain published a paper in Nature that claimed to reproduce the features of the Voynich language using a Cardan grille.”
I raised my eyebrows over my coffee cup to plead ignorance.
“It was invented in the sixteenth century by a Renaissance mathematician named Gerolamo Cardano as a device for decoding secret messages. It was simply a card with a series of holes cut out at selected places. To decrypt a message you laid the card over a page of some ‘carrier’ text and read out the message through the holes. Rugg used a Cardan grille over a prepared table of Voynich glyphs to generate a text with some, but not all, the traits of the Voynich manuscript. Rugg suggested that Kelley could have generated the Voynich text in that way with about three months of concerted effort. Many linguists are not buying it though. The Voynich is still defying analysis.”
“Miss Chandler,” I said, trying to make conversation, “surely the Voynich doesn’t dominate all your life. What occupies your leisure time, if you don’t mind a personal question?”
She was in mid-sip and wrinkled her nose at the taste. “I play tennis, jog, and write poetry.”
“What sort of poetry?”
“Pastoral odes, blank verse, a lot of personal things . . . My boyfriend said I should paper the walls of my apartment with my rejection slips.”
“So you are a poet. Any other interests?”
“I love to read, though my tastes aren’t very discerning.”
I took a bite of the bagel and chewed thoughtfully. “Best sellers, I suppose?” I said.
“Sometimes.”
“You wouldn’t have heard of something called The Voynich Verdict?”
“Oh, that!” she said and set her cup down hard, so that the spoon bounced out of the saucer. “Do you know that a faculty member here . . . well, a former faculty member, co-authored that book?”
“Really?”
She nodded. “Pamela Roderick. I feel partly responsible. I provided her with most of the background materials. Neither Dr. Dietrich nor I had any idea that she was going to write a text about flying saucers.”
I motioned to the waitress that we needed coffee refills. “So you worked with her for a while. Just out of curiosity, what sort of person was she?”
“She seemed normal enough. Rather pleasant, actually . . .”
“But . . . ?”
Miss Chandler poured a packet of sweetener into her cup and stirred thoughtfully. “But that guy she brought with her.”
“That would be her co-author?”
“I think so.”
“What about him?”
“He had these stare-y eyes.” Ann Chandler suppressed a shudder.
I switched the Professor of Comparative Linguistics ID for a press card made out for a prestigious science journal—another example of Quick Jerry’s art. I lost the briefcase and glasses and pocketed a voice recorder and notepad. The Chemistry Department secretary glanced at my new credentials and picked up a phone. “Dr. Janeway, there’s a gentleman here from Science Today who would like to talk to someone about Pamela Roderick.”
Eliot Janeway, the dean of the department, was a larger than life figure—tall and big-boned, with lots of black hair, a full beard, and a booming voice—a youthful fifty, I estimated. He led me back into a cramped private office and closed the door. “I suppose this is about that new book of Pamela’s. I understand it’s making quite a media splash.”
“Why, yes,” I said, “we’re covering it as a news feature. Our readers generally expect some background when we deal with something a little . . . flippant.”
Janeway leaned back in a leather swivel chair, lacing his hands behind his head. “Actually, its not all that funny, Mr. Sinowitz.” He knitted black, shaggy eyebrows. “Pamela gave up a promising career in theoretical chemistry—modeling quantum chemical dynamics—for this strange pursuit. We were all a bit shocked when she turned in her resignation a few weeks ago.”
“Where is she now? Do you know?”
“It was my understanding that she was due to begin a book signing tour this week. I think it’s starting in New York City.”
I took out the recorder, pad, and pencil. “You don’t mind?” I asked.
“Not in the least; although I’m afraid if you’re looking for reasons, I won’t be able to supply any.”
“Speculation, then?”
He fingered a ball and stick molecular model that had been serving as a paperweight. “We were all proud of her for that first book.”
“Are We Ready?”
“Yes. I thought it was a tour-de-force of sociological speculation, well grounded in fact. The only eyebrows it raised around here were from those who hadn’t bothered to read it. I remember thinking at the time: why shouldn’t scientists occasionally step out of their field and contribute something noteworthy to the popular literature? After all, C.P. Snow wrote novels, Carl Djerassi writes plays, and physicists are always morphing into social commentators.”
“That first book—did anyone in the Chemistry Department know about it while it was being written?”
“Well, I certainly didn’t. Although, in retrospect, if I had, I would have encouraged her.”
“It didn’t affect her work, then?”
“Not in the slightest. In fact, we co-authored a paper in the Journal of Physical Chemistry around that time. Pamela was—is—a fine theoretical chemist.”
“When the first book became such a publishing success were you at all concerned about how the accompanying notoriety would be perceived by the university administration and the student body?”
“You mean Pamela’s interviews on Oprah and Letterman? I think most people around here were tickled pink about it. You know, she gave a faculty seminar on the topic of that first book at the chancellor’s request.”
“But the second book—that was quite different,” I offered.
“To say the least. Pamela began bringing around this fellow Marsh while they were working on that.”
“What sort of person was this co-author, Reggie Marsh?”
“To be perfectly honest, I was never formally introduced, but he seemed a bit odd. I didn’t pay a great deal of attention.” Janeway laughed. “We meet eccentrics fairly regularly in the theoretical sciences.”
I made a series of squiggles on the notepad, trying to make it look like shorthand. “In what way was he odd?”
“In mannerisms more than in appearance I’d say. For one thing, he stood too close when he talked to you. I heard a couple of people joking about their personal space being violated. And apparently he was a compulsive talker once he got wound up. Lots of hand gestures—that sort of thing.”
“What did he talk about?”
“I gather it was mostly about some sort of flying saucer society that he was involved with. Here—this appeared on my desk one morning.” He tossed me a brochure. “I understand that most of the Chemistry Department got one.”
It looked to be composed with a desktop publishing program—a tri-folded sheet of copier paper printed on a low resolution ink jet color printer:
CENTER FOR THE INVESTIGATION OF ANOMALOUS AERIAL PHENOMENA (CIAAP)
A blurry black and white photo of some oval lights in a V-formation in the sky above a streetlight. The caption read, “What does the government know about this, and why is it being suppressed?” This was followed by a series of bulleted blurbs designed to catch the attention of the prospective true believer:
•An archive of over
1,000 UFO photographs
•Transcriptions of first person
accounts of alien abductions
•Recently declassified government
documents—Project Bluebook
•George Adamski Revisited
•A New Take on Erich von Däniken
•Is Shirley MacLaine
still Out on a Limb?
There was a New York P.O. address, a phone number, and a website domain address.
“Can I keep this?” I asked.
“Sure. Pretty far out stuff, huh?”
I pocketed the brochure. “Do you think Pamela Roderick has really bought into little green men?”
“Actually, I believe they’re supposed to be gray with large lidless eyes.” Janeway was chuckling. “The main story is about the descendants of the religious sect returned to earth after a few centuries on a world in a star system forty seven light years away.”
“You’ve read the second book then?”
He rummaged through a disorderly stack of books and papers on his desk. “I had it here somewhere. . . . But, yes, I read most of it. They make a pretty authentic-sounding case for an outrageous fabrication. As to Pamela’s real beliefs, it’s hard to say. Brilliant people have been known to be taken in by fortune tellers, spiritualists, charismatic leaders. . . .” Again, he knitted his black shaggy brow. “You know, Mr. Sinowitz, if she’s really putting us on, she’s doing one hell of a job.”
The satellite internet connection for the laptop had been a little slow, but I managed to log on to the CIAAP website between bites of a Big Mac in the Yale parking garage. The calendar of New York City meetings showed nothing until the end of the month, so I hyperlinked to Marsh’s e-mail address and typed:
Dear Mr. Marsh:
I have been following your revelations avidly for some time now. I have vital new information that confirms your theories on the thirteenth century abductions. Please respond with a date, time, and location for a meeting.
Sincerely,
Samuel Roscoe
Then I Googled Reggie Marsh. I didn’t find anything too startling. He had published an article on cattle mutilations in the June 1989 issue of Kansas Farmer. Born in Topeka in 1966—that made him a boyish-looking forty-four. Graduated from Kansas State with a BA in Agriculture in 1987. Worked as a technician in a state government Ag Lab 1988 to 1993, then sold irrigation equipment the rest of the ’90s. Published three more articles, all on alien abduction scenarios, in small circulation magazines. Helped to set up CIAAP in 2000 after moving to New York. Since then he has been the UFO feature editor of a weekly newspaper called Conspiracy Disclosure. Lists freelance writer as his current occupation.
Next, I searched the websites of the larger Manhattan bookstores. The Barnes & Noble on Fifth Avenue was announcing a Voynich Verdict book signing by Pamela Roderick tomorrow from 1:00 to 3:00 p.m. Finally, I reserved a room at the Plaza, figuring I’d earned a bit of luxury, and, after all, Pamela’s old man was paying my expenses.
Even people who hate Gotham have to admit that it’s beautiful at night. Aerial views are popular, but it’s at ground level that the splendor, the sleaze, and the chaos make for a real light show. The rented Mercury was an intruder here among a sea of yellow cabs, buses, and chauffeured limos.
I tossed the keys to the doorman at the hotel and pocketed a numbered ticket. I made about five steps across the lush lobby rug before a bellhop grabbed my suitcase and laptop.
The room overlooked the dark expanse of Central Park. It was furnished in French Provincial in a motif of Kelly green and burgundy with a turned-down king-size bed and three large overstuffed chairs. There was a small vase of fresh flowers on a half table before a gilt-framed oval mirror. I popped a chocolate from one of the pillows and rummaged through the service-bar, finally selecting a seven-dollar can of Heineken. I found the remote, crashed into one of the chairs, and turned on the wall-mounted flat-screen. Surfing through the channels proved a big waste of time, as I expected. I was just about to go back to a Rangers hockey game when I saw a close-up of Pamela Roderick.
It was the Jack Ratt Show. Ratt had black hair combed straight back, a gold earring, and a profile like a cigar store Indian. He was seated across an oak desk from Pamela Roderick, listening intently. I turned up the volume.
“—Georg Baresche, the earliest documented owner of the Voynich. He was an alchemist in Prague in the early 1600s. When he died, the manuscript passed to Jan Marek Marci, the rector of Charles University in Prague who promptly sent it to Athansius Kircher, a Jesuit scholar at the Collegio Romano in Italy. Marci’s cover letter was still attached to the manuscript when Voynich found it. It is the source of the claim that Emperor Rudolph II had owned it in the previous century.”
I had read somewhere that Jack Ratt, a relative newcomer, was going after Charlie Rose’s audience. He leaned forward as he scanned prompter notes on the desktop screen. “And so how did the manuscript end up in the Villa Mondragone where Voynich found it?”
Pamela tossed back a wave of red hair. “It has been assumed that the manuscript remained in the archives of the Collegio Romano until Victor Emmanuel II’s army captured Rome and the Papal States in 1870. Many Church properties were being confiscated by the new government, but a great number of books in the Collegio’s library were transferred to the personal libraries of its faculty since these were immune to confiscation. Kirchner’s papers became part of the private library of Petrus Beckx, the Rector of the school and the twenty-second General of the Jesuit Order. Beckx’s library was later moved to the Villa Mondragone, which had been converted into another Jesuit school—the Collegio Ghisleri. In 1912, in need of funding, the Collegio decided to discreetly sell some of its manuscripts.”
“Enter Voynich,” Ratt said.
“Yes,” Pamela agreed.
I sipped at the Heineken. This didn’t sound like a girl who had taken a plunge off the deep end.
There was a pause—long for TV, which abhors a vacuum. Then Ratt said: “Ms. Roderick—Pamela, we’ve traced the provenance of this strange manuscript. Now what leads you to believe that it represents a record of extra-terrestrial contact?”
She cleared her throat and drank from a coffee mug, perhaps gathering her thoughts, then matter-of-factly said: “The Voynich contains illustrations of plant forms that never grew on earth. It contains astronomical charts that represent star patterns not seen from the earth’s perspective. There are also symbols that have been associated with the Cathari, a religious sect that was persecuted in the thirteenth century. Those are established facts.” She paused, sighed, and continued. “We have good evidence to support the belief that the Voynich manuscript was intended as a holy book.”
“A holy book?”
“Yes. Perhaps in the sense that Exodus recounts history, or a historical tradition. It is an account written by the returned progeny of the Cathari who had been abducted, or as we prefer, rescued, from Earth in the thirteenth century.”
Ratt scanned the teleprompter notes. “What about the theory that some sixteenth century charlatan created the Voynich as a money-making hoax?”
Pamela smiled charmingly. “The manuscript may have been stolen and the hoax story may have been a cover-up. You see, the book was written by the first arrivals who were returned to Europe around 1500, roughly three and a half centuries after the Albingensian rescue. They were few in number—possibly less than ten individuals—and understandably cautious about their beliefs and history after the stories of the way their ancestors had been treated. “
“Why were only a handful returned?”
“Only a few chose to return. Most preferred to remain at their new home.”
“In the alien star system.”
“Yes.”
Ratt looked directly at the camera. “We’ll return to this fascinating story right after these messages.”
I hit the mute button and took a pull on the Heineken. It was almost like the classic description of psychosis that psychoanalysts are cautioned about. Perfect, often brilliant rationality until the one subject is broached . . . Some book publisher was making a windfall on Pamela’s delusion. Or was she putting the world on? Certainly, with her old man’s fortune in her future she wasn’t trying to sell books for the royalties.
I noticed Ratt and Pamela were back and cancelled the mute.
“. . . exactly is or was Albingensianism?” Ratt was saying.
“A form of Gnosticism, some say it was strongly influenced by Manichaeism. It was a dualistic religion that posited that the Demiurge who created the Earth was Satan, who they identified with the God of the Old Testament. They rejected all worldly matters as part of the inherent evil of Creation. War, capital punishment—all taking of life was abhorrent to them. They also proclaimed a True God who dwelt in a realm of light and who could only be reached by a life of purity and asceticism. Many abstained from the consumption of all animal products and refused to take oaths, which were regarded as accepting the domination of the malevolent Creator.”
Ratt widened his eyes at this. “I take it this was a short-lived phenomenon.”
“Comparatively brief. The movement arose in the eleventh century in the Languedoc region of southern France. In the twelfth century it spread to Italy, Spain, and Germany, and to northern France. The adherents were called Cathars from the Greek for ‘pure ones.’ The lengthier appellation ‘Albingensians’ refers to a town called Albi that was a hotbed for the religion, but the movement had no real center. In 1176, the Catholic Church declared it a heresy, but missionary efforts to convert the Cathars failed. In 1209, a full-fledged crusade against Albingensianism was declared. The veterans of earlier crusades to liberate the Holy Land responded enthusiastically. It was close to home and there was the promise of land and plunder. The crusade proved to be a series of bloody massacres in which little distinction was made between heretics and loyal Catholics who inhabited the same regions. The attacks took place at intervals over twenty years. In 1229, the major aggression was over and the Inquisition was established to root out and execute the remaining recalcitrants. By the early fourteenth century the Albingensian movement had been wiped from the face of the Earth.”
Ratt produced The Voynich Verdict and opened it to a bookmark. “But—according to your book—not from this distant world of aliens.”
“That’s right,” Pamela said. “Alien visitors rescued approximately one hundred Cathars and transported them to their home world. Then, slowly, starting in the 1500s and continuing sporadically up until today a few of their progeny have chosen to return to earth.”
I shut off the TV and tossed the remote onto the bed where I had placed the laptop. On a lark, I got up and decided to check my e-mail. And it was there—Marsh had taken the bait:
Dear Mr. Roscoe:
Your communication has piqued
my interest.
Call me at (212) 555–4949.
Reggie Marsh
This was too good—a New York City area code. I dialed and got Manny’s Pub in the East Village. Yes, they had a Reggie. When they got him, his voice sounded normal enough, although the bar was noisy and there was theremin music in the background.
“Mr. Marsh, I can’t believe my good fortune,” I said. “Yes, I’m in Manhattan. I’ll catch a cab and be right down.”
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