by Lev Grossman
“Did I tell you they were thinking of offering me a job?” Edward said.
“A job? You mean on top of being chief scrivener, or whatever you are now?”
Edward nodded. Zeph and Caroline looked at each other.
“And you said no,” she prompted him carefully.
“Oh, of course!” Edward said, suddenly embarrassed. “Anyway, they didn’t exactly offer it to me. They were going to make some arrangement with the firm. I don’t know what, exactly.”
“You know, some people say he’s in a coma—the Duke, that is.” Zeph picked at a splinter on one of his chopsticks. “That the family is covering it up for legal reasons. Some people say they have a child they keep locked up in an attic who’s deranged. I read that there are whole families of servants who live on the estate grounds like serfs, and who haven’t left it for generations. You know the kind of crap. The best one was a letter in the Economist that claimed they have their own currency on the estate—that it’s a self-sufficient economy with its own money, so they pay no taxes to the crown.”
“Creepy,” said Caroline. “How good is a duke, anyway? Is it higher than a count?”
Nobody knew. The conversation stalled. They all sipped their Japanese beer, and the waiter, a surly-looking teenager with a scraggly mustache, quietly slipped the check onto the table face-down and skulked away.
“Oh, Fabrikant wants to know why you didn’t go to his party,” Zeph added.
“That guy,” Edward said. “What does he want with me?”
“I don’t know, exactly.” Zeph watched the people passing on the sidewalk. “He’s the one who told me who you were working for, though. I guess his company, InTech, does business with them. I think he’s trying to get the Wents to buy into it. But that’s strictly in confidence.”
Edward nodded.
“They do live in a castle. The Wents. I know that about them.”
“A castle?” For once Caroline sounded impressed.
“It even has a name. They call it”—he outlined a rectangular plaque with his thumbs and forefingers—“Weymarshe.”
Caroline snorted.
“Quel anachronism.”
AFTER THEY LEFT Edward spent the rest of the day in his apartment watching TV in his boxers, lying on his couch and eating M&Ms out of a one-pound bag. It was a good couch. He’d ordered it from Pottery Barn in the hectic flush of his first bonus from Esslin & Hart, and it was still, four years later, the most expensive object he owned. It was gigantic, nine feet long and upholstered in brown velvet and, by any imaginable aesthetic standard, hideous, but there were times when he retreated to it for comfort. This was one of those times.
He was depressed. His job in London, the prize for which he’d worked so long and hard, was seeming more and more worthless every day, but at the same time his connection to the Wents and the codex was getting more and more tenuous. Except for Margaret. But now that she had the key to the Wents’ apartment, it occurred to him, she had no particular use for him. So instead he watched old people playing golf. He watched shows about wildlife, about army ants building living bridges and giant squid lurking in the depths of the Marianas Trench and blue bower birds building their tufty earthbound nests in Australian forests. Any time anything remotely financial came on he changed the channel, and he winced whenever he happened to land on CNNfn, with its slippery, poisonous blue serpent of fiscal data slithering across the bottom of the screen, rapaciously devouring its own tail.
Zeph called at around seven, but Edward didn’t pick up. His answering machine was filled to capacity with messages from colleagues, invitations to the Hamptons from work-friends, desperate pleas for assistance from Andre, but he was way behind in returning them, so far behind he knew he’d never catch up. The more messages that backed up the harder it got to think about them, so they just sat there, a black hole of guilty, unfulfilled obligations on the wall that just got blacker and blacker and blacker.
For dinner he ate an entire jar of sweet Italian cocktail onions, evil-looking but infinitely savory little pearls packed in vinegar and still frosty cold from the fridge. At ten he filled a shot glass full of scotch and drank it. At eleven he got ready for bed.
Before he went to sleep Edward walked over to his desk and turned on his computer. He dumped his saved game onto the hard drive and opened up MOMUS. It seemed pointless now, not that it hadn’t been before. He could hardly remember the last thing that happened. He’d gone looking for the library, and then it was gone, and then time started speeding up...? Still, it was something to escape into. And he definitely felt like shooting something. He sat down at the keyboard.
He was still standing in front of the vacant lot where the library should have been, but instead of an empty field of rubble it was an explosion of greenery. Weeds and bushes and entire trees had sprung up from the ground where before there was nothing, as if he’d been standing there for years, rooted to the spot, while nature took its course around him.
The weeds were moving, rustling, visibly growing. In fact, something was badly wrong with time: It was racing forward at a ferocious rate. Earlier, back when he was on the bridge, he’d had the uncanny sense that time had lurched forward in his absence. This time he was watching it happen, and as it did so nature re-claimed the city in a monstrous orgy of fertility. Massive vines choked off the skyscrapers, wrapping around them in spirals, snaking in and out of broken windows. Trees erupted from manholes, rooted in the fertile mud of the sewers, waving their branches as they grew like movie zombies rising from the grave and stretching their stiff limbs. A green acorn the size of a Halloween pumpkin fell from somewhere above him and burst into a million woody fibers in the street.
As far as he could tell, he himself was not affected. The world was getting older around him, but he wasn’t. He strolled back toward Rockefeller Center as the city literally went to seed around him. In the distance, somewhere uptown, an office tower sighed and quietly gave up the ghost, sinking gracefully in on itself in a cloud of dust. Whatever cosmic braking mechanism had existed to keep time running at a regular, reasonable pace had totally failed, and it was racing forward out of control.
Then as suddenly as it began, it stopped again. Time slowed down drastically until it was back to its usual crawl. Standing on the edge of Central Park, which had become an impenetrable Sherwood Forest, Edward watched the rioting plants freeze in place and become still. Time was time again.
You know what? Edward thought. This is lame. And it doesn’t even make sense anymore. He saved his game, shut down the computer, and went to bed.
THE PHONE WAS ringing. It seemed like it had been ringing for hours, but it could only have been a few seconds, since the answering machine hadn’t picked up yet. Edward opened his eyes and half sat up. The back of his head rested against the cool hardness of the wall. He cleared his throat loudly and lustily, then picked up the receiver and put it up to his ear. He closed his eyes again.
“Hello,” he said.
“Hello?”
The voice was grainy, staticky, like an old recording engraved on a wax cylinder. It spoke with an odd accent, somewhere between English and Scottish, that was both strange and familiar at the same time.
“Hello?” he said again.
“Hello? With whom am I speaking?”
“This is Edward. Who’s this?”
“Edward? This is the Duchess.”
He opened his eyes. The apartment was dark and quiet, all its indistinct shapes and outlines reassuringly present and accounted for. For a second he thought he’d been dreaming, but he was still holding the phone in his hand.
“Hello?”
“Hello?” She mimicked him girlishly. “‘Your Grace’ would be more proper if we were going by Debrett’s, but I’m not going to stand on ceremony. Look—can you hear me? I can hardly hear you.”
He remembered the one time he’d seen her, out on the sidewalk, with her clingy cream dress and her heartbreaking smile. It already seemed like years a
go. He could barely connect the person he was speaking to now with the one he had met then. The static was like a rushing wind, rising and falling, tides of white noise waxing and waning, swelling and receding. He closed his eyes again, and his thoughts formed themselves into a picture with the effortless draftsmanship of sleep. In his mind’s eye he saw the woman in the cream sun hat talking to him through a snowstorm. She was all alone, lost in a blizzard of white noise that raged against a pitch-black sky. He wanted to help her.
“I don’t have much time,” she said, “so I’ll make this quick. It was you I met the other day, wasn’t it? Who found my earring?”
“I broke your earring.”
“Well, yes.” She laughed. “I was going to let you off for that. Look, Edward, I need you to find the Gervase as quickly as you can. Can you do that?”
She spoke in the most ordinary, matter-of-fact tone imaginable, like a woman asking for a glass of water at a restaurant. He swallowed.
“But I thought—” He started over. “I mean, sure, yes. But what I was told was that you didn’t want—”
“Look, forget whatever they told you,” she said impatiently. A voice of command. “I’m telling you now. And Edward, the Duke can’t know about this. All right? It has to be a secret. Between us.”
Something fell and clattered in the background, and she swore. There was a rustle as she bent to pick it up. Still half asleep, Edward nodded. A glowing green readout on his phone ticked off the seconds, seven of them, before he realized he had to say something out loud, too.
“All right,” he said. “I mean, fine, sure. But—” He hesitated. What did he want to know? Was this real? Was he insane? Was she? It was all so very dramatic. It was as if the world had read his mind and granted him his most secret wish. He was afraid that if he said the wrong thing it would dissipate, that it would vanish and would never have been, leaving him clawing helplessly at wisps of smoke. This was his chance.
“But what?” she said, clipped. “You want to know what you’ll get paid, is that it?”
That wasn’t it, not at all. But he didn’t say so.
“You’ll get paid what you earn,” she said, answering her own question. He could hear her smile, suddenly sweet. “Don’t try to contact me, I’ll call you in a week.”
Then she was gone.
11
IT WAS LATE AFTERNOON the next day when the phone rang again. Sitting at his desk, staring at the Financial Times Web site without reading it, Edward let the answering machine get it.
“Edward, it’s Margaret. Please pick up.”
She wasn’t whispering, but there was a hushed urgency to her voice. Edward sat on the arm of the couch and picked up the phone.
“Margaret,” he said coolly. “How are you?”
“I think I’ve found something,” she said.
“How exciting for you.”
“But I need your help.”
“You do.”
He stood up and walked over to the window. He still resented Margaret for blindsiding him so effectively over the Wents’ key, even though a part of him was grateful for it. He decided to show his resentment by completely suppressing any of the excitement he felt at the sound of her voice. At the back of his mind, he also knew that every minute he stayed on the phone with her he was giving up a degree of plausible deniability that could be useful down the line, if their little ruse was ever discovered.
There had been a cloudburst, a momentary break in the heat wave, and the pavement outside was dark with wet gray stains like vast, unexplored continents.
“Where are you?” he asked.
“Where do you think I am? I’m in the Wents’ apartment.” She managed to convey wintry contempt without changing her tone of voice in the slightest. “Can you come here? I need some things.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t think that’s such a good idea right now.”
There was a long silence. He relished the inversion of their power dynamic, however temporary it might be. Edward watched an old woman wearing a yellow raincoat ride by on an old bicycle.
“Why can’t you get them yourself?”
“Because I don’t think I should leave the apartment right now,” she said. “I had some trouble getting past the doorman this morning. I was forced to prevaricate.”
“What do you need?”
“Do you have a pen? I need a soft toothbrush, some wooden toothpicks, some mineral oil—Swan is the best—a can of compressed air if you can find one, a soft cloth, and a tack hammer. And a flashlight.”
“Is that all?”
“Yes.” If she was aware of his sarcasm, she didn’t show it. “You know what a tack hammer is?”
“I know what a tack hammer is.”
They were silent for a few more seconds. A dog barked in the street. The day hung in the balance, massive weights balanced on either side, like a tanker truck poised halfway off a cliff in a cartoon, waiting for a hummingbird to alight on the bumper. He sighed.
“I don’t have a key,” he said. “You’ll have to meet me downstairs.”
“I’ll be in the lobby in exactly one hour.”
She made him synchronize their watches.
THIS TIME WHEN Edward passed the doorman he was positive he’d be stopped, but he just kept walking and tried to look self-assured and nothing happened. The man in the seedy livery never looked up from his Arabic newspaper, which he read with the aid of a magnifying glass. It was after six in the evening. Edward was carrying a bulky shopping bag.
A couple of table lamps were on in the lobby. He’d never seen it with the lights on, and it was surprisingly tawdry: a cracked marble endtable, an oriental carpet worn down to a grid of coarse burlap. A hint of stale cigar smoke hung in the air, left over from cigars that had been smoked in the 1950s. Margaret was standing by the elevators, looking very tall and thin. Her face was stony.
When she saw him she pressed the elevator button without a word. They waited in silence until it came.
“I wasn’t sure you were coming,” she said gravely, after the doors had closed. Then, with an obvious effort: “Thank you.”
“I wish I hadn’t.” Edward listened to the rumble of the machinery as they went up. “You’re sure this is safe?”
She nodded.
“There’s no one here. The cleaning woman left at three.”
They stood shoulder to shoulder, staring straight ahead like two anonymous corporate drones on their way to the same meeting. They bumped shoulders getting out, and Edward stood aside and gestured for her to go first with exaggerated gallantry. She ignored him. The lights were off in the apartment.
He stepped gingerly onto the soft oriental carpet and then froze. Abruptly, and with no warning, he lost his nerve. He felt like a man whose foot was resting, gently but quite definitely, on an unexploded land mine. This was not a good place to be.
Margaret didn’t look at him, just kept walking. He watched her back disappear down the hallway toward the stairs, her footsteps fading. All at once he found himself running after her pathetically, a puppy desperate not to be left behind.
“There’s something I have to show you,” she said, when he caught up. “Something I found when I started clearing out those crates.”
“How long have you been here?”
“Since this morning.”
“You’ve been here all day?”
“I came at six, before they were up.”
They stopped at the tiny door that led to the spiral staircase, and he followed her up the steps. She ran her hand familiarly along the railing, as if she’d already been up and down it a thousand times.
“They were here earlier,” she said. She gripped the doorknob, braced herself, and threw her weight backward. The heavy door jerked open with a crunching sound. “In the apartment. Or somebody was. I heard people talking. There was a man speaking in an English accent. But nobody came up here.”
“Really? Did you overhear them planning a murder?”
Stepping th
rough the doorway into the cool air of the library was like slipping into a pool of deliciously cold water. His sarcasm suddenly seemed overdone, and it vanished into the stillness. Margaret took off her shoes—sensible mary janes—and set them neatly aside. She wore dark stockings. He caught a glimpse of her pale heel where one of them was worn through.
“I don’t want anybody to hear us walking around,” she explained.
She’d been working. The bookshelves were now full, and she’d laid down wrapping paper on the floor along the entire length of one wall. It was covered with stacks of books. All the wooden crates were now open, and the edges of the bookshelves were thickly furred with color-coded stickies. On the table were the laptop, Margaret’s notebook, three cans of Diet Coke, and a crumpled-up, half-empty bag of fat free extra-dark pretzels, unsalted.
“Well,” said Edward. “You’ve been busy. I hope you’re not billing me for this.”
“I’ve gone through approximately two-thirds of the collection, and I’ve glanced at the rest of it. I’ve arranged them by period and country, then alphabetically. I keep my notes in longhand, but I put a basic catalog on the computer as well.”
Edward walked over to the table where the laptop was sitting. A window of the Wents’ cataloging program was open. He ran a quick search for “Gervase” in the database, but nothing came back. It wasn’t going to be that easy.
“So,” he said curtly. “What did you want to show me?”
“When I got here this morning I wanted to at least unwrap and open all the books and do a cursory inspection.”
“So you did.”
“Yes, I did. Look at this, it’s particularly fine.” She picked up a small book bound in highly wrought leather. The cover was stamped with hundreds of tiny repeating swirls and squiggles and flourishes, arranged into squares and rectangles. “Italo-Greek. After Constantinople fell in 1453 some Greek book-binders set themselves up in Italy. They created their own highly distinctive decorative aesthetic. Look, the text is actually in English.”