Codex (23 page)

“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?

“At the time I had only the vaguest memory of who you were, but somehow the Duke figured out that we went to college together, and he had the idea we were best buddies. Anyway, he told me Blanche had hired you to find this book, and that I was supposed to invite you to this party I was having. To make sure you were there—he was pretty emphatic on that point. Somebody was going to meet you there. But you didn't show.”

“Yeah. Sorry. Short notice.”

Fabrikant pushed his plate away and leaned forward confidentially.

“He's a very strange guy, Edward. I'd drop him as a client if I could, but he's too rich, and we need the money.” A cloud of worry crossed his fresh, unlined face. “I'm trying to get InTech off the ground. There's no VC anywhere. I'm two months away from missing payroll here. But you—I don't get it. What's the point? You don't need him. You're set. You're golden. And you're getting caught up in something that could fuck up your career in a very serious way. It just doesn't make sense.”

Edward hedged.

“What's the big deal?” He tried a chuckle. “It's just a bunch of books, right?”

“Exactly my point,” Fabrikant said. “Think about it. How much is one book worth to you? Why not get out now?”

“I
am
out. What more does he want from me?” A note of huffiness crept into Edward's voice. “How much further out can I get?”

“Further. A lot further. Look, just think about it. That's all I'm asking.”

Edward was silent for a minute, rubbing his chin, defiantly not thinking about it. The whole subject was uncannily resistant to serious, sober, analytical thought of any kind. Edward had the impression that Fabrikant wasn't so much concerned about him anyway. It was more that the very idea of somebody not acting in their own professional self-interest was offensive to his sensibilities, a blasphemy against his personal creed of greed.

Gauging his moment perfectly, a passing waiter paused long enough to whisk both their plates away. When the check arrived, shockingly large, they argued over who would pay, and to his surprise Edward won. He kept the receipt, told himself he'd find some way to expense it later. They walked out together.

The power breakfast crowd was just beginning to thin out. Nine-to-fivers and shoppers charged past them, heads lowered, already laden with briefcases and bags from Barneys and Bloomingdale's and Crate & Barrel. The ordinary commerce of ordinary people. Edward considered the distinct possibility that he might go back to bed when he got home. He and Fabrikant squinted at each other appraisingly in the bright sunlight that sparkled off the polished door handles of parked cars and the stainless steel implements on display in the windows of Restoration Hardware and Williams-Sonoma.

“So you really don't know what this is all about?” Fabrikant said. “Why he's so worked up about that book, or whatever it is?”

Edward shrugged.

“It's probably worth a lot of money.”

“Is it?”

“Isn't it?”

“It'd have to be worth a hell of a lot,” said Fabrikant, “for them to care this much.”

“Six figures. Maybe more.”

Fabrikant snorted derisively.

“I'm surprised at you,” he said. His concerned look came back, and this time Edward wondered if Fabrikant might actually pity him. “This really is all you know, isn't it? I thought you were a pro at this stuff, but you're just an amateur. You're worse than I am.”

He shook his head sadly. It wasn't meant as an insult, and Edward found that he didn't particularly resent it.

“Look, just try to watch out for yourself,” Fabrikant said. “And whatever you do, stay away from the Duchess.”

“I thought you said you never met her.”

“I haven't. And I never, ever want to. You know she has a reputation?”

“What kind of reputation?” Edward asked numbly, feeling more and more like he was out of the loop, that he'd missed the meeting, was flying blind.

“She eats guys like us alive.” Fabrikant winked broadly. “For breakfast.”

He turned away, squaring his broad shoulders and thrusting his hands into his pockets, which made him look even more dashing than ever, if possible.

T
HE NEXT DAY
Edward and Margaret left the city.

They took the West Side Highway uptown until it became Route 9A, which runs north out of Manhattan along the Hudson River. The further north they drove the faster the traffic moved and the thinner it got, and soon they were racing at highway speeds past the monumental facades of Riverside Drive apartment buildings, then past Grant's Tomb, with cloverleaf exits peeling off east into Harlem and north into the Bronx. A perfect little red tugboat bobbed around in the water under the George Washington bridge, looking exactly like a bath toy.

The car was a rental car—a cheap, snazzy, green Ford Contour, not much more than a stereo on wheels—but Edward loved to drive, and he didn't get to do it very often. He rolled down the window, weaving and fighting for position with the other drivers, and thought about nothing at all. It was a relief to get out of the city. Breakfast with Fabrikant had been an awkward reminder of all the responsibilities he was neglecting, not to mention a warning of future difficulties to come, but now he almost managed to forget about them again, or at least to section them off in a carefully quarantined area of his brain where his thoughts never went without strict supervision.

It was a perfect, golden summer day. The air was hot and dry, and the road swooped breathlessly up and down the steep side of the Hudson Valley. He drove it like a race course, but Margaret didn't seem to mind. They took a lumpy old macadam highway through Van Cortlandt Park, a three-laner worn slick and shiny with age. The morning sun shone down through the pollen-dusted air, through the leaves of giant prehistoric trees that leaned out from the hillside over the road, flourishing on the carbon dioxide released by the millions of breathing humans nearby.

Margaret looked blankly out the window, not talking, lost in her own thoughts. There was less hostility between them now after the day spent in the Wents' apartment. There was a bond of amiable resignation—nothing shared, nothing exchanged, but a tacit, temporary acceptance of their odd-couple partnership. She wore a blue and green plaid skirt and blue stockings. She couldn't seem to fit her long legs comfortably under the dashboard.

“Who would name a town Fresh Kills?” said Edward for no reason as they passed a road sign.

“‘Fresh creeks.' ‘Kill' means ‘creek' in Dutch.”

“Why'd they put this place all the way upstate in Old Forge anyway? The Annex, I mean.”

“I don't know.”

“Do you go up there a lot?”

She shook her head.

“The Annex doesn't have much that interests me. No significant medieval holdings. It's mostly just a repository for the Hazlitt papers, of which there are several hundred feet, and for overflow storage. I went up once or twice back when I worked at the main library, on business.”

She looked out the window again. Edward expected her to fall silent, but she didn't.

“I wanted to tell you something,” she said. “I've been doing some work on the pressmarks in the Duke's library.”

“Pressmarks?”

“Call numbers. Most private libraries don't use a standard classification like the Dewey decimal, they have their own unique filing systems, made up by the owner more or less arbitrarily. Librarians call them pressmarks. Each bookpress—bookcase—has a name or a number assigned to it, or a letter, or a Roman emperor, or a part of the body, or what have you. They can be quite idiosyncratic. Did you read
The Name of the Rose?
”

“Saw the movie. Sean Connery. Christian Slater.”

Margaret refrained from comment.

“In the Wents' system each bookpress is named after an Arthurian knight: Lancelot, Galahad, Gawain, Bors, and so on. I've been able to figure out where just about everything used to be, originally. But there are some interesting gaps.”

She passed him a piece of paper. He glanced down at it, caught a glimpse of a fearsomely complicated diagram in colored pencils, and handed it back.

“I'll take your word for it.”

“It's a rough map of the library's original layout. Missing books are marked in red. Most of a whole bookcase is gone, here, and a few scattered volumes here and here. If it comes to that, we can learn more about these two by looking at the books on either side of them—they probably left traces of their covers behind. I've also been rereading the text of the
Viage.
The eighteenth-century fragments.”

Edward kept his eyes on the road.

“All right.”

“There's something—” She hesitated. A moment of fierce internal struggle ensued, which she quietly but decisively lost.

“There's a certain amount of evidence, both linguistic and historical evidence, that might suggest—if one were to interpret it that way—the possible existence of an older precursor text to Forsyth's version of the
Viage.
”

After that short speech she straightened up primly in her seat, like a nun who had been forced to refer, however euphemistically, to something obscene. She fixed her eyes on a point directly in front of her. Edward recognized this as a sign that she was getting ready to lecture, and it was.

“From a linguistic point of view, the text looks like a fake. Why? Because it's not written in the Middle English of Chaucer or of the Pearl Poet. English varied a lot from place to place in the fourteenth century, but the
Viage
doesn't sound like any kind of medieval English I've ever come across. It sounds more like a half-educated eighteenth-century hack doing his best impression of what he thinks fourteenth-century English should sound like.

“But that doesn't necessarily mean that the publisher, Forsyth, wasn't working from a genuine fourteenth-century source text. Even if he did have one, he wouldn't have followed it very closely. More likely he would have translated it into modern English, badly, and then added whatever archaic touches he thought were necessary to make it sound ‘authentically' medieval—more authentic, for his purposes, than the real Middle English text. Like a novelization of a movie based on a novel.”

“So you're saying there's no way to tell.”

“I'm not saying that at all.”

She reached into the back seat, rummaged in her leather bag, and took out a thick volume with a plain library binding: pine green with a white call number stamped on the spine. Its edges were frilled with yellow stickies.

“Listen.” She opened the book and ruthlessly cracked the spine. “Although the Middle English of the
Viage
is bad, it's not quite as bad as it should be. There are echoes of something authentic in the meter. In Middle English you generally pronounce silent e's, and a lot of the lines here scan better with the silent e's pronounced. It could be just a nice archaic touch—except that in 1718, when the
Viage
was published, no one knew how to pronounce Middle English correctly. They just thought Chaucer wrote unmetrical poetry and couldn't spell very well.”

“Good. I like it. I'm sold.”

“There's more.” She brushed back a strand of hair and kept flipping through the book.

“Take this phrase: ‘the kyng Priamus sone of Troye.' What the narrator means is, ‘King Priam of Troy's son,' or ‘the son of King Priam of Troy,' but he doesn't say that, he has ‘King Priam's son of Troy.' You see the difference? The grammar is pure Middle English: The object of the possessive comes before the genitive modifier. Only a scholar would have known that, and Forsyth, whatever else he may have been, was no scholar. He couldn't possibly have gotten it right. He couldn't possibly.”

Edward smiled.

“You're arguing my side now.”