PROLOGUE

A Silk Road Caravan travels down a river valley in the Hindu Kush with a wooden Cabinet lashed to one of the donkeys. The Cabinet arrives at a Curiosity Shop in the Meat Packing District in New York and is opened by a Dealer in a silk Chinese robe who looks like Mephistopheles. A preserved animal hide the size of a small fox's pelt is inside. In Mississippi, Andy Somerset’s father dies bankrupt, and the family plantation is to be sold at auction. Andy is a gifted musician who studied quantum physics at Stanford. He records a jazz version of Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” for his Julliard audition and vows to make it rich in New York.