by Lev Grossman
She tried to slam the door on her way out, but Edward caught it before it could close.
“Laura,” he said, “it’s just over the bridge in Brooklyn. It’s fine. We still have plenty of time.”
She pursed her lips and said nothing, then she opened her leather bag and rummaged around in it furiously for a few seconds. Edward waited. What the hell was she looking for? A gun? A compact? A glove, with which to slap him across the face? She came up with a small square packet wrapped in pink tissue paper.
“There,” she said icily. “The Duchess asked me to give you that.”
He unfolded it standing in the doorway. Inside was a single earring in the shape of a tiny, exquisite silver hourglass. He turned it over in his hands, tenderly, then he looked up again just as Laura slammed the door in his face.
EDWARD TOOK a long, lukewarm shower. His whole body felt dull and achy after his mostly sleepless night. Edward’s building was equipped with immensely powerful pre-war plumbing, and his shower was capable of dispensing torrents of warm water at crushingly high pressure for indefinite periods of time. He let it sluice down over his face, smooth as glass, flattening his hair, spilling down his cheeks, gently closing his eyelids. He felt like one of those intrepid explorers who, bayed by cannibalistic pygmies, discovers a secret hideaway in the pocket of space behind a waterfall.
He blinked. He’d drifted off on his feet. It was time to get moving again. He only had five hours to catch his plane, less than that now. He shut off the water, dried himself hurriedly, and got dressed. Before he left he sent an e-mail to Zeph and Caroline letting them know what was going on.
It was after ten when he stepped out onto the sidewalk, his head still spinning. It was a Saturday morning, and the street was empty. A broad fat leaf, still green, came flipping down out of the clear blue sky and flopped gracelessly onto the pavement. He felt like he was walking on the moon.
A large, shiny black sedan was parked by the curb. As he passed it one of the rear doors opened.
“Wait,” said a voice. “Edward.”
Edward turned around to find the tall, lanky form of Nick Harris jogging to catch up with him. He wore a rumpled gray suit that looked like he’d slept in it, and not especially well. His hair was longer than Edward remembered it. In his dark glasses he looked like a blond vampire.
But he was smiling. Edward just smiled back at him. At this point he was past surprise. He just accepted the fact that the world had resorted to simply flinging people at him at random.
“What?” he said.
“Need to talk to you.”
Edward didn’t want to stop, and Nick was unwilling to let him go, so they walked along the sidewalk together in step. Nick had a small black cell phone in his hand. He said something into it and tucked it away in his jacket.
“Were you waiting for me?”
“Yes. Do you have the book?”
“You actually staked out my apartment?”
Nick took off his glasses. His eyes were bloodshot from lack of sleep.
“Yes. Parking’s a nightmare around here, have you noticed?”
“I don’t have a car.”
“Have you got the book?”
“So now you’re saying it does exist?”
There was an uncomfortable pause. The morning sunlight was painfully strong, and Edward shaded his eyes with his free hand. He wondered if he was actually as good at this as he thought he was.
“This isn’t a game to us, Edward.”
“Not when you’re losing, anyway. But to answer your question, no, I don’t have the codex.”
Edward couldn’t help noticing that the big black sedan was now pacing them down the block.
“But you know where it is,” Nick said. “You can get it.”
“I might be able to.”
“Well, we have to get rid of it. Burn it, if we can.”
“It won’t burn.”
Nick blinked at him. He pushed back his floppy bangs.
“What do you mean?”
“The codex is written on parchment, not paper. It’s not flammable. Listen, I’m in kind of a hurry—”
The cell phone reappeared in Nick’s hand.
“I have His Grace on the line,” he said. “He has a straight cash offer for you. I think you’ll find it surprisingly generous. We want to settle this in a friendly way.”
He scratched the back of his head unselfconsciously. Edward had last seen Nick only a few days ago, but those days had apparently been difficult ones. He hadn’t shaved, and his famous pocket watch was nowhere in sight. Edward didn’t feel especially sorry for him. He sighed and closed his eyes. All he wanted was to bring this scene to a timely close—it had really ceased to be at all interesting in any way. Why were they still after him? He’d found the codex. It was real. Whatever was inside it, whatever Margaret had brought to light with her secret decoder ring, it was his. He groped for words. How can I put this? Game over. I win.
“Give it to me. Give me the phone.”
Edward stopped walking and held out his hand. Nick gave him the cell phone. Edward hung it up, snapped it shut, and handed it back.
“I’m sorry,” he said. He spread out his arms. “We have nothing to talk about.”
Nick didn’t seem surprised. He watched Edward with the hardened cheeriness of somebody who was accustomed to rejection. Now he was scratching his shoulder.
“I think we do. Have you ever wondered how you got that cushy job in London, Edward? The Duke arranged it for you. He could rearrange it just as easily.”
“I don’t believe you,” Edward said, smiling sunnily.
He didn’t. It had to be a bluff. He was reasonably positive it was, anyway. Not that he was overly attached to his job at the moment, but he was still proud of having won it in the first place, and he was damned if he was going to give that up. Either way, he had no time to get his balance back, because while Nick was delivering this carefully calibrated bombshell Edward heard the little flurry of sounds associated with the halting of an automobile—the ratchet of the emergency brake, the car door opening, the keys-still-in-lock chime—and out of the sedan climbed a short Turkish-looking man with a mustache: the Wents’ ex-doorman.
In retrospect the scratching had probably been a prearranged signal. The doorman joined Nick on the sidewalk, threading his way jauntily between two parked cars.
“We need your help on this one, Ed,” Nick said with the avuncular manner of a soccer coach. “You could save yourself some real trouble.”
Edward waited, but neither one of them said anything more. Looking from one to the other, Edward was visited by the creeping suspicion, almost unbelievable on the face of it, that he was being physically menaced.
“Where were you headed?” Nick went on casually. “Why don’t we give you a ride? We can talk in the car.”
It was much, much too early in the morning for this, but Edward sized up his options, trying to get himself into the spirit of things. What the hell, neither of them was as tall as he was, and the Turkish doorman looked like his best scrapping days were behind him. He could probably just shove his way out of it. But Nicholas was toned and pink, and as Edward watched he set himself in a sparring stance, suggestive of some kind of old-fashioned English martial arts training. Edward was exhausted, and he hadn’t been in a fight since grade school.
He backed up a step. Nick and the doorman spread out on either side of him to cut off his escape routes. His mind wandered back to his days as a swashbuckling air pirate in MOMUS. What would his virtual alter ego do here? He was sick of running away.
Then the two men weren’t looking at him anymore. Their gaze had shifted to something over Edward’s shoulder.
“Top o’ the marnin’ to ye, lads!” boomed a vibrant bass voice in an atrocious attempt at an Irish accent. The voice stopped, then tried again, sounding exactly as bad as the first time. “Wait. I’ll get it. Top o’ the—wait. Top o’ the marnin’ to ye!”
Edward risked a
quick look behind him.
As enormous as he was, it had never occurred to Edward that Zeph’s appearance could be in any way threatening. Now he was forcefully reminded of the effect Zeph’s considerable bulk had on strangers. Granted, Zeph was wearing Teva sandals and a black T-shirt with the words GENERIC HUMANOID CARBON UNIT on it in yellow block letters, slanted perspectively to look like the prologue to Star Wars. Nevertheless, he was six and a half feet tall and well north of three hundred pounds, and he was sporting an extremely scary-looking beard. From where Edward stood he actually appeared to be partially blocking out the morning sun.
Edward turned back to face his adversaries. The standoff was over. He cleared his throat.
“I never liked you,” he said to the Wents’ doorman, “and I don’t think much of your boss either. So why don’t you and James Blond here get back in your carriage and go back to the Duke of Earl and you can all have tea and crumpets together?”
It was all he could think of on the spur of the moment.
AT THIS HOUR on a weekend the drive to Brooklyn didn’t take long, even stopping to drop Zeph off at his apartment downtown, and in half an hour he was standing on the crazed, cracked cement sidewalk in front of Margaret’s building. A ginger cat twitched its long white whiskers at him from its perch behind a window box. Next to the column of doorbells he found the name ‘Napier’ written on a paper slip in her neat, pointy handwriting. A raindrop had fallen on it and then dried, blotting the black ink into a delicate blue watercolor bloom.
Edward pressed the button. From the depths of the house came the distant echo of an answering ring.
A silent interval followed. Shock and fatigue were making his mind wander, and for a long, terrifying flash he thought she might be gone, that she might have just taken the codex and left town—where would she go? back to her mother?—but an instant later Margaret appeared. Evidently the buzzer wasn’t working, because she came down to let him in herself. Her face was puffy from sleep, and her slender body was hidden under a baggy T-shirt and gray sweatpants. She didn’t seem particularly surprised to see him. He followed her upstairs.
Her apartment, so disorderly the night before, was clean and neat now. The Chinese food was cleared away; the dishes were stacked in the drainer; her clothes were out of sight. The remains of the gutted books were arranged in two neat piles on the floor, one of leather covers and spines, one of discarded pages. Only the bed was rumpled.
“Sorry I woke you up,” Edward said.
She waved aside his apology.
“Did you sleep enough?”
“Enough,” she said. “There’s a lot to do.”
“What about your friends?”
“They didn’t come. I told them not to.”
She didn’t offer any other explanation. Her voice was husky, and she ran herself a glass of water at the kitchen sink. The water pipes clanked loudly.
“There’s something I have to talk to you about,” he said. “I need to take the codex.”
Her expression didn’t change. He went on.
“About an hour ago Laura Crowlyk woke me up. The Duchess’s assistant. She came to my apartment and handed me a plane ticket to London and told me to bring the codex with me. I’m supposed to give it to the Duchess.”
Margaret nodded. Her face showed no expression, no reaction, not even blankness.
“When is your flight?”
“This afternoon. Margaret, the codex isn’t ours, even though we found it. The Wents still own it.”
“I know that,” she snapped, but halfheartedly.
She turned to the desk where she’d been working. There was a package on it, wrapped in a canvas tote bag from Target, and Margaret unwrapped it. It was the case he’d found on his very first day in the Wents’ library. It was made of fine-grained wood, plain but finished and polished to a buttery yellow glow in the Saturday morning light, with delicate metal hinges on one side and a single cleverly wrought catch on the other.
“I brought it with us yesterday when we took the rest of the books,” she said quietly. “When we were leaving the Wents’ apartment. The case is modern, of course, but it’s quite nice all the same, and that binding is almost certainly original. It fits perfectly. Goatskin, I think, over oak boards. So it wasn’t Lydgate after all.”
She opened the box to reveal the covers of the hollow book, nestling in the velvet interior.
“I should have guessed the first time. This was the codex all along. Minus its contents, of course. But I suppose it’s really the binding that makes a codex a codex, technically speaking.”
Edward nodded and touched the dark, gnarled leather surface of the cover, with its dense ornaments and indecipherable icons and images, worn smooth with age and handling. He’d been so fascinated by them the first time he’d seen them in the Wents’ library. Now he wanted to ask Margaret what they were, who made them and how, and what they meant, but it was already much too late for that. He was out of time.
He flipped the case closed again and latched it. Her eyes followed his hands, as if she were hoping for a last look or a last-minute reprieve. He felt worse than he expected. He took a deep breath.
“I can’t thank you enough for everything,” he said, the words sounding all wrong even as he said them. “You know the Duchess will pay you for all the work you’ve done. Just send them an invoice—take whatever we agreed on and multiply it by ten. She won’t mind now. Chances are she won’t even notice. And God knows you’ve earned it.”
They were standing face-to-face, Margaret cupping the tumbler of water with both hands, her dark hair flat and unwashed but still lovely. There was so much more that he wasn’t telling her, and so much more after that he wanted to tell her and didn’t know how.
“What do you think she’ll do with it?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Probably have it assessed. Maybe arrange to donate it to a museum. Maybe she’ll keep it for her personal collection. I really don’t know.”
With each fluent lie he told, Edward felt like he was losing her, like his words were rolling time backwards, erasing everything they’d been through together and leaving them strangers again, the way they had been that first day in the library. But he couldn’t tell her the truth. It was the Duchess’s secret to tell, not his, and Margaret was better off not knowing it anyway.
“I don’t want money, Edward.” She couldn’t meet his eyes. He wondered if she’d prepared this speech. “I just want to spend time with it. I know it wasn’t my discovery”—she cut him off—“no, it was you who found it in the end. I know that. But I can read the codex, Edward. I can speak for it. I can speak for him, for Gervase. No one else could do that as well as I could.”
“I know, Margaret. Believe me, I’ll do everything I can for you.”
“Then take me with you.”
Even as his heart was breaking, a stream of words was coming out of his mouth that he felt no identification with or control over whatsoever. “Consultancy,” “core competencies,” “client relationship,” “maintain ownership of the process.” It was like a robot talking. He, or it, talked faster and faster, trying to stay ahead of his own feelings of shame and doubt, which loomed over him like a breaking wave curling above a surfer.
“Listen,” he said, desperately trying to bring the horrible speech to a close, “I think I’m staying at Weymarshe. I’ll call you when I get there, we can figure out the terms. All right?”
She gave him a small, forced smile.
“We’ll talk about it when you get there,” she said.
“I’ll call you. However you want to do it.”
Edward slipped the case back into the canvas tote bag and hoisted it jauntily onto his shoulder. It was almost time to go.
“Did you have time to read any more of the book?”
“Some.” She nodded, seeming as relieved as he was to talk about something other than their future. “Some of the pages need restoration work before they’ll be fully legible.”
&n
bsp; “Did you figure out how it ends?” he asked. “We last left our hero in the middle of a frozen wasteland, right? Something like that? Don’t keep me in suspense.” Everything he said and thought made him cringe.
She pursed her lips.
“It’s interesting. I’ve been teasing out some of the earlier underlying texts, before this one. The palimpsest. It looks like Gervase toyed with a few different endings. In one of them the protagonist goes native and marries a Cimmerian woman. In one he becomes very holy and converts them all to Christianity. In one it turns out—I think—that Cimmeria was really England all along, only it was so devastated by plague and winter as to be unrecognizable.”
“Very Planet of the Apes.”
“Isn’t it? But Gervase scrapped all those versions. In the final draft, the hero wakes up one morning and realizes it’s Easter Sunday. It’s been a long time since he’s been to Mass, and he needs to go to confession. He doesn’t know if the Cimmerians are Christians, but he asks, and they agree to lead him to a church.
“They take him to a miraculous chapel, telling him that to pray there is his only chance for a safe return home. The chapel is mysteriously constructed entirely out of stained glass, without a single stone. I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Paris, but I imagine it looks something like the Sainte-Chapelle. The windows depict stories out of classical myth: Orpheus and Eurydice, Pygmalion, the fall of Troy, and so on. In a way the whole structure is like a codex. Gervase points out the resemblance: ‘Hyt was as a very boke hytself, a volume boonde wyth walles, with leeves of glas.’
“It is, he realizes, the Rose Chapel. It’s the mystical church that the stag knight described at the very beginning of the story, that was the object of his quest all along. He’s finally found it, long after he stopped looking for it. The quest is finally over.
“It’s hot inside, which makes a certain kind of literal sense—I imagine a glass building like that would function something like a greenhouse. The lord feels warm and safe for the first time in months. He prays, and as he prays he lets go of the things he had been looking for. All at once he no longer misses his wife, or his home in England. He no longer cares about anything on earth. He lets go of everything that had ever been important to him. Maybe it’s a spiritual epiphany, a shedding of all his earthly, material bonds, or maybe he’s just exhausted. In a mixture of faith and disillusionment, ecstasy and disappointment, he takes off his armor, curls up, and falls asleep in front of the altar. As he sleeps, his soul leaves his body and is accepted into heaven.”