Chapter 1: Rainy Night Autopsy

By the third night of rain, De Jong had lost the ability to distinguish the tolling of bells from the dripping of water. The cold fluorescent lights in the morgue buzzed and hissed, like some insect struggling to death inside a metal casing. He held the scalpel, its tip gliding across the pale thoracic cavity of the drowned man, pressing down slowly along the curve of the costal arches. When the blade sliced through the skin, there was no sound, only a dull, wet resistance, as if cutting into a thick piece of leather soaked through with water. The cold light fractured on the blade’s edge into a thin, elongated streak of white, reflecting off the deceased’s hollow clavicles before slipping into the shadows within the chest.

The intake log read: Unknown male corpse, approximately fifty years old, recovered from the canal. But De Jong did not believe it. He snipped open a lobe of the lung; what gushed from the incision was not water, but a thick liquid with an amber sheen. Its scent was sharp, like nutmeg and pepper. The fluid seeped slowly along the texture of the lung tissue, pooling into a small depression in the metal tray, its surface shimmering with an oily glaze. De Jong set down the knife, leaned in to sniff, and frowned. As the odor pierced his nasal cavity, it carried a burning sensation, as if someone had sprinkled a handful of crushed spice powder directly onto his nasal mucosa.

“This is not river water,” he told his assistant. “This shouldn’t be in his lungs.”

The assistant stopped his note-taking pen and looked up at him. De Jong did not turn around. He extended his index finger, dipped it into the fluid in the tray, and rubbed it between his finger pads. The liquid dried quickly, leaving a pale yellow oily stain that glowed with a faint fluorescence under the cold light. He smelled his fingertip; the spicy scent was stronger now, mixed with a hint of sweet cloyness that was nearly masked—like old honey that had sat in an iron can too long, leaving behind a fermented, sour-sweet residue after oxidation.

The assistant recorded: “Foreign object in lungs, amber-colored oily liquid, pungent odor, suspected spice extract.” The scratch of the pen tip on paper was audible to De Jong, but his gaze remained fixed on the deceased’s rigid limbs. He walked around the autopsy table to the foot of the body, grasped an ankle, and lifted it gently. The joint did not loosen; the entire lower leg was like a stick frozen solid, holding a stiff, slightly outward-turned posture. He released the ankle and tried to lift one of the dead man’s arms. It was equally rigid, the elbow bent at an abnormally fixed angle, as if someone had deliberately positioned it and then secured it with some object.

“At least six hours after death before it was positioned,” De Jong said, his voice echoing clearly in the empty morgue. “Rigor mortis has already set in, but the positioning did not disrupt the rigidity. This indicates it was done either before full rigor set in, or after it had formed, with the joints forcibly manipulated. Look here.”

He pointed to the outer side of the deceased’s right elbow, where a small patch of dark purple bruising was visible, its edges blurred, as if crushed repeatedly by a blunt object. “This is a post-mortem injury. Someone forcibly bent his arm into this position after he died. The ligaments in the elbow joint were strained.”

The assistant stepped closer, looked down at the bruising, and then at the deceased’s other arm. The two arms were nearly symmetrical in their positioning, both slightly extended outward, palms facing up, as if making a gesture of open-handed surrender. De Jong stared at those hands for a long time before straightening up and walking to the wall-mounted telephone to dial his colleague at City Hall.

The phone rang four times before being answered. The voice on the other end was hoarse from being woken up: “De Jong? Do you know what time it is?”

“Deceased surfaced in the Old Canal at dawn, no signs of struggle, pockets empty,” De Jong said. “That was the information you gave me.”

“Yes, and?”

“Are his pockets really empty?”

“Completely. Not even a thread. When we pulled him up, he was wearing only a soaked shirt and trousers. No shoes. Have you found anything on your end?”

De Jong remained silent for two seconds. “I’m still investigating.”

He hung up the phone and walked back to the autopsy table. The opened thoracic cavity of the deceased glistened with a damp, dark red hue under the cold light, the lungs spread out on either side like two flattened sponges. De Jong picked up the scissors and cut open the junction between the stomach and the esophagus, the blade tearing through tissue with a subtle ripping sound. As he peeled back the stomach wall, the interior was hollow, containing only a small amount of dark brown fluid. He used tweezers to part the liquid, and a lead seal rolled onto the surface of the table, making a sharp metallic clink. It bounced twice in the metal tray before coming to rest.

De Jong’s pupils contracted. He set down the scissors and picked up the lead seal with the tweezers, bringing it under the light. The surface of the seal bore the VOC emblem, the two-headed lion of the Dutch East India Company. The two heads of the lion faced left and right respectively, with a crown in the center. Below the crown, a ring of small letters circled the design, worn and blurred by time. But De Jong recognized the pattern. He recognized that two-headed lion crest, that crown, and that specific arrangement of letters. He had seen an identical design on a rubbing once.

He turned, set down the tweezers, and walked to the storage cabinet. The door creaked open, releasing a wave of smell from old paper and mothballs. From the very bottom shelf, he retrieved an old envelope, its edges yellowed, the creases worn to the point of tearing. It was the last letter sent by Matthes before his disappearance. He broke the seal and drew out the letter paper; tucked between the pages was a rubbing. The paper of the rubbing was thin and brittle, its edges curled, but the design on it remained clear—the VOC emblem, the two-headed lion, identical to the lead seal found in the deceased’s stomach.

De Jong stared at the cast for a long time. Tucked inside the envelope was a dried leaf from some tropical plant, its veins thick and prominent, edges crumbling into powder. He remembered a line Matius had written in his letter: “I saw things at the Port of Rotterdam that should not exist, Cornelis. If you received this letter, it means I am no longer here.” At the time, De Jong had assumed Matius was rambling. Matius was always like that—half-truth, half-lie, fond of mystery and misdirection. But now, holding the lead seal in his hand, feeling the uneven grooves of the engraving beneath his fingertips, he suddenly felt that every word Matius had spoken was the truth.

“Matius,” he whispered.

His assistant stood by the autopsy table, watching him in silence. The cold fluorescent lights in the morgue continued their dull hum, while rain seeped through the gaps in the walls, sounding like someone rubbing their hands together incessantly outside the window. De Jong placed the lead seal back on the tray, slipped the cast back into the envelope, and tucked it into the inner pocket of his coat.

The trace analysis results arrived early the next morning. De Jong sat in the swivel chair in his office, the thin sheet of the report clutched in his hand, his gaze scanning the numbers and jargon line by line. The spice mixture contained seventeenth-century Javanese nutmeg and Ceylonese cinnamon, laced with residues of ancient wax sealing. He set the report down, closed his eyes, and translated those figures and terms into concrete images in his mind—a seventeenth-century sailing ship, its hold stacked with hemp sacks filled with nutmeg and cinnamon; the ship unloading at a port where someone sealed the cargo with wax and lead; then the shipment vanished. Three hundred years later, a fifty-year-old man was pulled from a canal, a lead seal in his stomach, residues of that cargo in his lungs.

He opened his eyes, picked up the phone, and dialed the Shipping Association. They checked their archives and informed him that the deceased was a high-ranking executive at a shipping company, reported missing three weeks prior. Not a vagrant. De Jong noted the name and dialed another number.

“Hester, it’s De Jong.”

Rain crackled on the other end of the line, followed by Hester’s voice, hoarse and worn by time: “Cornelis, it’s been a long time since you called this number. What is it?”

“A letter Matius sent before he disappeared contained a cast of a lead seal inside the pages. I just found an identical lead seal in the victim’s stomach. VOC emblem, the double-headed lion.”

Silence held the line for a few seconds. The sound of rain trickled through the receiver, like someone tapping on a tin roof in the distance. Hester finally spoke: “VOC. Matius was investigating a shipment of spices at the Port of Rotterdam before he vanished. Then he disappeared without a trace.”

“A spice shipment?”

“He said the cargo shouldn’t exist. A seventeenth-century shipment—it shouldn’t exist. And then he was gone.” Hester paused, her voice dropping. “Cornelis, don’t investigate this. You and I both know what happened to Matius.”

“I have no intention of stopping.”

“Do what you want,” Hester said. “The leads for that shipment are hidden in the old port district of Rotterdam. Be careful.”

The line went dead. De Jong held the receiver, listening to the dial tone, leaving it in his hand for a long moment before finally placing it back on the cradle. He stood up and walked to the window. The rain was still falling, beads of water clinging to the glass, blurring the streets outside into gray, indistinct blocks. He reached out and wiped a streak across the glass; the droplets slid away, revealing a small, clear patch of the street—a horse-drawn carriage passing by, wheels splashing through puddles, a pedestrian with an umbrella hurrying past, disappearing into the curtain of rain.

He returned to the morgue and re-examined the victim’s fingernails. Using tweezers, he gently scraped out the debris from under the nails and placed it under the microscope. The fragments were a dark brown, irregular in shape, with distinct layers of paint—the bottom layer a dark wood varnish, the top layer a lighter pigment. Cross-referencing this with the materials provided by the Shipping Association, he confirmed that the paint matched the hull coating used on old-style oak sailing ships. The deceased had been in contact with a location housing ancient shipping contracts. He gripped the lead seal tightly and walked out of the morgue.

In the rainy night, the bells struck the hour. De Jong stood on the steps at the entrance of the morgue, rain dripping from the eaves onto his shoulders. Without an umbrella, he walked a few steps down the street and found a phone booth at the corner. The glass door was half-open, a dim yellow light glowing inside. He stepped in, closed the door, and dialed a secure number.

The line connected. Silence from the other end.

The rain outside the booth swelled into a single roar; De Jong could hear the water drumming against the glass and the distant blast of a ship’s whistle from the canal. He held the receiver, his knuckles white from the grip.

“Which sunken ship was the lead seal cast in Matius’s letter taken from?”

Through the sound of the rain, the other party finally spoke: “You found the seal. You found him.”

The call ended. De Jong stood in the phone booth, the dial tone lingering in his ears for a long while. He set down the receiver and pushed open the glass door. The rain hit his face, soaking him instantly. He stood in the downpour, looking up at the sky. The gray-black clouds hung low, obscuring the moon and the stars. A low whistle drifted in from the direction of the canal, like a sigh rising from the bottom of the water.

He clenched the lead seal in his pocket and walked toward the old port district. The rain continued to fall, the bells continued to ring; he could not tell if the sound came from a church steeple or from the wreckage of a sunken ship deep in the canal. But he knew that before his disappearance, Matius must have walked this very path.