Codex (19 page)

“It would be a pain in the ass to ship,” Edward said, “but I hate to give it up.”

“I don't think I get it,” said Zeph.

“What's to get?” Edward shrugged. “I just like watching those medieval suckers work.”

After a few hours they went across the street to a Japanese restaurant, where it was cool. It was late afternoon, and they were the only people there apart from some out-of-work hipsters and homesick Japanese tourists. Japanese covers of Western R&B hits played nonstop in the background. Edward and Zeph still felt a touch hungover, and they binged on salty miso soup, excruciatingly spicy kimchi, and steamed dumplings seared on the bottoms and dipped in soy sauce and vinegar, washed down with rounds of bitter Japanese beer.

When they were done Zeph sat back and yawned in an exaggeratedly casual way.

“So I've been doing a little snooping on your friends the Wents,” he said.

Edward poked at some waterlogged ginger with his chopsticks.

“What about them? And how do you even know about them?”

Zeph tapped the side of his nose with one thick finger, meaningfully.

“Who are the Wents?” said Caroline.

“That's who Edward is working for,” said Zeph. “The ones with the library. You know they're rich?”

“Of course they're rich,” Edward said.

“But do you know how rich?” For once Zeph sounded almost serious. “The Wents are ‘rich' the way Marvin Gaye was ‘attractive to women.' Did you know they're the third-largest private landowners in England?”

“What?”

“You don't know the half of it. There's all kinds of rumors about them online. Try searching the royalty newsgroups sometime. You know they pay
Forbes
to keep them off their annual list?”

Edward laughed.

“Zeph, that's ridiculous. Our firm handles a good chunk of their portfolio. I'd know if they had that kind of money. Anyway, that's just not how money works. You can't hide that much of it. It finds ways to get itself noticed.”

“It's true! Edward, these people have one of the biggest private fortunes in Europe, and they're spending half of it trying to make sure nobody knows about the other half. And there was a scandal a few years ago—apparently they had a son who was kidnapped. The Duke wouldn't pay the ransom.”

“So what happened? Did they get him back?”

Zeph shook his head.

“He died. Apparently the kidnappers were hiding him in a meat locker and he froze to death. They kept it out of most of the papers.”

Edward glanced at Caroline. “Zeph, you know most of that Internet stuff is bogus.”

“He's right,” Caroline said. “Honey, remember the time you posted on that blog about how Bill Gates had been a child actor who played Batman's son on TV? You remember how many people believed that?”

“Batman didn't even have a son,” Edward said.

“But that was different! That was—look, I made that up! Jesus, I'm like the Cassandra of the Internet here. At least run their names through Lexis-Nexis sometime and see what comes back. They're worth
billions.
”

“Billions of dollars or billions of pounds?” Caroline asked.

“I don't know! Billions of euros, or sovereigns, or pieces of eight, or whatever they use for money over there! They have a huge private estate in Bowmry. They're recluses—there's a famously huge hedge that runs all the way around their property. Their
hedge
is famous, for Christ's sake.”

“So where does all this alleged money come from?”

“That I don't know. Though
you
should be able to find out, Edward, if you tried,” Zeph said, still hurt. “They keep it all over the place. A lot of it's pretty new—she comes from a big manufacturing family. He must have had some too, though—his family goes back forever. They probably cornered the market on blue face paint back in 1066.”

“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 ago. 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.