by Lev Grossman
“There’s no Went room at the Chenoweth. The Duke’s letter implies that when they made the donation, the Wents stipulated that some sort of special facilities would have to be built to house it. Unless I’m mistaken, that hasn’t happened.”
“So—what?” said Edward irritably. “What am I missing?”
Margaret shook her head.
“You don’t understand how libraries work. People donate vast quantities of books and papers to the Chenoweth all the time, sometimes entire estates worth, most of which are either of questionable value or none at all.”
She stood up and began returning the office to a semblance of its former state.
“Evaluating and processing donations is extremely labor-intensive. If a book is obviously valuable and legally free and clear it might go directly onto the shelves, but more often it takes months or even years, and there’s always a backlog. In a case like the Wents’ donation, where the materials are encumbered with secondary financial conditions, it can take decades. In fact the Chenoweth has every incentive not to catalog them, so instead it buries them in a vault somewhere and hopes for some kind of change in the situation. A death, a new generation of heirs who might ameliorate the conditions of the bequest, or forget about them. Anything. Libraries live a long time, and time only makes books more valuable.”
“So you think the twelfth box could still be buried in the backlog? After fifty years?”
“The current administration probably doesn’t even know it’s there. In fact, it probably made a point of forgetting.”
Margaret was a wizard with paper. As she talked she squared off dusty stacks and realphabetized files and corralled stray sheets like a cardsharp shuffling and dealing.
“You have no idea what the Chenoweth vaults are like,” she said. “Trunks and suitcases and bags and cardboard boxes stuffed with love letters and doodles and phone messages written on grocery bags, all of which may or may not be more or less tied up in pending legal disputes, none of which has ever been formally inventoried. And the books are the least of it. The walls are stacked to the rafters with paintings and beaver skins and old firearms and locks of hair that no one even knows how to properly care for. Once a colleague of mine found a beat-up old armchair in a corner of the vault and took it back to his apartment. It sat in the corner for six months before he noticed a tag on the back: It was Robert Louis Stevenson’s writing chair. A couple of years ago somebody found Dante’s ashes in a library in Florence. They’d been sitting on an upper shelf in a back room for seventy years.”
“Fine.” Edward stood up. “Great. So. What do we do? Can we get into the Chenoweth somehow and look for it?”
Margaret didn’t answer. Until that moment Edward hadn’t realized how tired she really was. Now she put both hands on the back of a chair and leaned on it. She closed her eyes, and her dark hair fell forward over her face.
“All right,” she said woodenly. “If it’s there, it’s probably in the Annex facility, up in Old Forge. Overflow storage.” The chair creaked under her weight. “I’ll go there and find a way to get into the vault.”
“Good. How?”
“I don’t know.”
“I can help you,” Edward said earnestly. He didn’t want to make her do everything herself, and he needed to stay involved, to stay near her, to keep things under control, or at least within range of his general supervision, and he was afraid she would realize how little she needed him. “I have the time. I know you have other work to do. Your dissertation, or whatever you—”
“Oh, who cares about my dissertation!” she snapped.
“Don’t you?”
She didn’t reply, just shrugged and stared at the shuttered window.
“What’s it about, anyway?” he prompted.
“You wouldn’t understand.”
“Try me.”
She sighed. He didn’t really care what her dissertation was about, but she seemed angry about something, and he wanted to know what.
“All right. My dissertation”—she cleared her throat, a sarcastic schoolgirl delivering a book report—“entitled A Scholar and a Gentleman: Gervase of Langford and the Problematics of Secular Medieval History and Historiography, explores the role that Gervase played in the revival of Scholasticism in late fourteenth-century England, a movement that helps mark the transition from the later Middle Ages to the early Renaissance. Gervase is in many ways an anomalous figure, a layman who pursued historical research at a time when—”
To Edward’s relief, she broke off there.
“I know. It’s boring.” To his surprise, Margaret actually looked chagrined, even embittered. “Even my colleagues are bored by it, and believe me, their tolerance for soporific monographs is world class. Five hundred pages of solid scholarly competence.”
“You really wrote five hundred pages?” Edward was impressed. He’d never written anything longer than a twenty-page term paper.
She nodded and pushed her hair back behind her ears.
“That was eighteen months ago. I haven’t written anything since. I’m blocked.” She brushed away a tear, angrily, as if a fly were buzzing in front of her face. “I never thought I would be. I’ve never had trouble writing. Never.”
Edward felt an unexpected rush of sympathy for her.
“I’m sure you’ll think of something.”
She shook her head impatiently.
“It’s not me. It’s him. It’s Gervase. I’ve never had trouble writing,” she repeated. “Something’s not right. Something’s missing. I stare at it, and it all makes sense, and it says nothing. There’s something missing, something I’m missing about Gervase, I’m sure of it!” Unconsciously, her pale hands knotted into fists. “And it’s not my fault. There’s something he won’t tell me. No single thing that he says or does defies explanation, but it never entirely adds up, either. But what am I missing?” It was a rhetorical question; she was speaking to an unseen audience of her peers now, or possibly to Gervase himself. “It’s somewhere there, between the words, in the space between the letters. Why did he die so young? Why did he stay at Bowmry and never go to court? Why did he leave London in the first place? Why, if he did write it, is there so much pain and anger in the Viage?”
“Maybe he was just an ordinary person.” He knew he should be nice, he should comfort her, but for some reason, he didn’t really know why, Edward goaded her instead, kicking her while she was down. He couldn’t stop himself. “Maybe he wasn’t a genius. Most people aren’t. He wasn’t lucky. He wasn’t important—you said it yourself. He wasn’t even happy.”
She looked at him, and her eyes were unattractively red around the edges, her downturned mouth solemn.
“I know what I said.”
13
“TELL ME SOMETHING, Edward,” Joseph Fabrikant asked, leaning back in his chair. “How much do you know about the Wents?”
The chairs at the Four Seasons were upholstered in fawn leather, and they were so extravagantly comfortable it was actually hard to sit upright in them.
“Not as much as I probably should.” Edward pressed his knuckles against his front teeth and stifled a yawn. It was eight thirty in the morning the next day, which was very early indeed on his new sleep schedule. He prodded his tomato and basil omelette with a fork and squinted at it blearily. Joseph Fabrikant, evidently tired of pursuing Edward through the intermediary of Zeph, had finally ambushed him by calling him at home and pressuring him into breakfast. Now he sat across the table from Edward, his highly symmetrical face half remembered from across woozy lecture halls, a snow-covered cross-campus walkway, a beery dorm-room party, leaving with the prettiest girl there. Fabrikant had been a natural insider the same way Edward had never seemed to really be part of anything at all. The morning sunlight flooded through the high windows and fell on him at flattering angles, a tall, handsome, successful, affable blond demon.
“Why? How much do you know about the Wents?”
“As much as I’ve been able to find
out,” said Fabrikant. “Which is pretty damn little.”
The restaurant was half full, mostly with businessmen and Upper East Side dowagers in pairs and threes, and the air was full of conversation and the clatter of heavy silverware muffled by expensive acoustical engineering. They’d already exhausted their store of college gossip. All that was left was business.
“Here’s what I know,” said Edward. “They’re rich, they have a lot of old books, and they don’t get out a whole lot.”
Fabrikant didn’t laugh. His bushy yellow eyebrows lowered in concentration, and the muscles flexed in his square jaw. Edward wondered whether he had any sense of humor whatsoever.
Edward had ordered a mimosa with his omelette, aware that it was a wildly inappropriate drink for what was supposed to be a power breakfast. But he hadn’t been feeling very empowered lately. It was clear why Fabrikant had asked him here: They were both junior members of New York’s young financial all-star circuit, with a slight but definite personal connection between them. What would follow was a matter of ritual: a mutually beneficial exchange of mildly confidential information between respectful rivals, nothing too criminal, just part of business, one of the hallowed traditions of the fiscal fraternity. Information flowed like water these days, and sometimes even the best plumbers got their hands wet.
But information was something Edward was in short supply of these days, as regarded both the market—God help him if Fabrikant brought up the interest rates in London, he hadn’t checked them in a week—and whatever nebulous sphere it was that the Duke and Duchess inhabited. And if what Zeph said was true, if Fabrikant really was trying to get the Duke to invest in his company, then Fabrikant was in play in both worlds. That only added another layer of complexity, and Edward was having trouble keeping them straight. He hadn’t been tending his carefully nurtured sphere of influence lately anyway, and it was an effort to heave himself back into the world where Fabrikant lived, the world of work. It was a world, he vaguely remembered, that used to be his. The champagne flute containing his mimosa stood in a shaft of sunlight, and the bright yellow liquid glowed hypnotically.
“Just tell me what you know, and I’ll tell you what I know,” Fabrikant said, as if he were talking to a child. “How does that sound?”
“Look, you’re going to get the short end of the stick here. I don’t know anything you don’t know.”
“Peter told me something about the work you’ve been doing for him. Tell me about that.”
“Peter? You mean the Duke of Bowmry?”
“Yes. Why, what do you call him?”
“I don’t call him anything. I’ve never even met him.”
“You will.” Fabrikant set about methodically demolishing a towering edifice of French toast. “Once he starts calling you, you can’t get rid of him.”
“Does he call you in the middle of the night?”
“I don’t think he ever sleeps. Wait till he starts instant messaging you.”
Edward cautiously sipped his mimosa.
“So what kind of business are you in with the Wents, exactly?” he asked, sidestepping. “Aren’t we competitors?”
“Not at all. InTech is very nichey. Strictly technology stuff. We baby-sit them on some of their high-tech holdings. A little biotech, a little Internet. Nothing you should worry about.”
“Okay.”
“As far as I can ascertain, we only deal with a tiny fraction of the Wents’ overall portfolio. I don’t think even your colleagues at E & H know about everything they have.”
Edward had forgotten how disarmingly handsome Fabrikant was. He looked heroic, almost knightly, with his symmetrical dimples and his deeply cleft chin. His suit was made out of a fine dark gray-green wool that seemed to soak up light from the rest of the room.
“So what’s he like?” Edward said. “The Duke, I mean?”
“The Duke? He’s an asshole.” He chewed meditatively. “Don’t get me wrong, he’s everything he should be—polite, generous, professional, whatever—but...” He groped for some word that was outside his executive vocabulary. “He’s a dick. You know what they say about him in London? That dogs are scared of him.”
“Huh.” Well, if there was fishing to be done, Edward wasn’t above doing it. “What about his family? Do they have kids?”
“Just the one son. You heard about that? Horrible.” Fabrikant shuddered and took another bite. “I’ve never met the wife.”
They ate in silence for a minute. One of Edward’s forks slipped off the table, and a waiter materialized to whisk it away almost before it hit the carpet.
“I was supposed to, once,” Fabrikant went on after a while. He regarded Edward with his freakishly pale blue eyes. “Meet her, that is. He asked me out to his place in the country when we first started doing business. He flew me to London, but that’s as far as I got. Something came up—I think he got sick again. The hotel had a videoconferencing room, one of those deals where you sit at one end of half a table, watching the other guy on a screen sitting at another half a table somewhere else. The Duke had one of these rigs set up at his house.”
“At Weymarshe?”
Fabrikant shrugged. “They have a lot of houses. It was weird. Here we are having dinner, and he has a Constable hanging behind him, and I have Dogs Playing Cards. He has hundred-dollar scotch, and I’m drinking the house red. He’s eating off—anyway, you get the idea. Once I forgot and asked him to pass the salt.”
Fabrikant belched unselfconsciously.
“I hear he’s not doing well,” Edward prompted. “His health, I mean.”
Fabrikant nodded. “He’s in London now. Some Harley Street clinic, a new treatment.” Fabrikant’s oddly guileless expression turned serious, like a worried child. “Now tell me what’s going on at that apartment.”
Edward caught himself before he could say “What apartment?” Fabrikant was clearly several steps ahead of where he should by rights have been, and he wasn’t going to let Edward leave the breakfast table without some kind of quid pro quo. Edward had no idea what he should or shouldn’t tell him, or how close he was to the Duke, or whether or not that even mattered. He was picking up the rules as he went along. But he was clear on one thing: He was going to keep the Duchess out of it. Somewhere along the line he’d developed a fierce sense of loyalty where she was concerned. He grimaced. He was as bad as Laura Crowlyk.
As innocently as he could he explained to Fabrikant what Fabrikant probably already knew: what Laura had asked him to do, and that the Duke had then asked him to stop working on the project, and that he’d dropped the matter then and there. He left it at that. He said nothing about Margaret, or the phone call from the Duchess, or that he’d been back to the apartment since then.
Fabrikant studied him skeptically.
“So you’re not still looking for—you know?”
“What?”
“That book?”
Edward shook his head slowly, seriously. Fabrikant stared at him, trying to hold his gaze. Edward kept his face blank. The moment passed. Fabrikant nodded, looking thoughtful but not convinced.
“That’s probably for the best,” he said slowly.
And there it was, Edward thought. Fabrikant wasn’t here on his own behalf. He was here for the Duke. Edward was being reconnoitered, and not particularly subtly, to make sure the Duke’s prohibition was being respected.
“He talks about it sometimes, you know,” Fabrikant said.
“Who, the Duke?”
“He was here a few weeks ago. Came by the office, met the staff, treated everybody to dinner at Lespinasse and a lorry-load of British charm. All those ‘don’t you know’s and ‘my dear boy’s that he can’t seem to get through a sentence without. You know how he is.” He did a bad imitation of the Duke’s upper-crust accent. “Or I guess you don’t. Anyway, we all ate it up. Afterwards I went up to his apartment with him alone and we sipped brandy out of giant snifters and smoked cigars and he ordered the servants around. I was humoring him.
We’re trying to put a deal together. He talked a lot about his ancestors—he’s crazy about that genealogy stuff.
“Anyway, he mentioned you. I don’t know how you came up. It seemed to make sense at the time. He told me that hiring you was all his wife’s idea, that you’re one of her pet projects.”
Edward froze. He looked up from his breakfast.
“I don’t follow you.”
“Told me you were her latest hobby. One of her ‘phases.’ He said that if you ever found that book, he’d rip it up, right in front of her.”
A terrible, icy fear crystallized in Edward’s brain, of what he didn’t know. He chuckled as casually as he could, but it came out a little hysterically.
“That’s ridiculous. I’ve never even met the Duchess either, just her assistant. Crowlyk.”
It wasn’t completely true, but it might as well have been. It was at least plausible. Fabrikant nodded sympathetically.
“I was embarrassed for him, to tell you the truth. Most of the time the Duke’s a classic gamesman. One of the best close-to-the-vest players I’ve ever seen. You could learn a lot from him actually,” he added guilelessly. Edward winced inwardly. “I don’t know what he was really getting at, but whatever he was after, the delivery wasn’t up to his usual standards. Makes me think there’s something else going on here. Something besides money.”
“Besides money? Like what?”
Fabrikant shrugged.
“I didn’t ask. Maybe he was drunk, or whacked out on medication or something. Anyway, it wasn’t one of those conversations you want to prolong unnecessarily, if you know what I mean.”
Fabrikant was doing a lot of talking—much more than he really had to. Why? Clearly, his primary allegiance was to the Duke. He had his company to look out for. But something else was going on here as well—Fabrikant seemed genuinely confused about what the Duke was really up to, and genuinely concerned about what Edward’s role in it might be. The Duke was his client, but Fabrikant could still think for himself. Maybe he and Edward could help each other out without compromising their respective loyalties too egregiously. Fabrikant obviously knew more about what Edward had been doing than he was letting on, and less about what the Duke was doing than he was comfortable with. Could there be something else on offer here—a tentative, unspoken truce? An alliance between pawns?