from the preview copy

>The Blastophaga psenes, that microscopic Levantine infiltrator, had been shuttling between the Racine cheese caves and the bootleg fig stills of Kenosha County since 1929, carrying in its thorax not merely the genetic detritus of ancient Smyrna cultivars but the molecular blueprints of what Department of Agriculture entomologists would later classify as "economic terrorism via pollinator manipulation"—though by then the Wisconsin Syndicate Wars had already claimed seventeen lives, six of them sycologists. Dr. Mehmet Özdemir, formerly of the Constantinople Fig Research Institute (dissolved 1923, personnel scattered to the winds like so much pollen), had been recruited by the Kowalski Cheese Consortium specifically for his expertise in sykomyzithra, that forbidden Anatolian technique of introducing fig latex into aged cheddar during the crucial forty-eight-hour window when the bacterial cultures achieved what he called "mystical receptivity." His rival, Professor István Balogh of the defunct Austro-Hungarian Ficus Commission, had thrown his considerable knowledge of wasp migration patterns behind Big Eddie Torrino's fig brandy operation, transforming what should have been a simple matter of Prohibition-era bootlegging into a complex dance of cross-pollination sabotage that made Hicks's old troubles at the Pullman yards look like a Sunday picnic.

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