Codex (25 page)

Margaret was up at the front desk talking to the staff. He watched her slim, straight form from where he sat. Despite himself, he was impressed: She handled herself like a pro. She was holding up better than he was. There had been a minor stir when she came in, when the staff recognized her and gathered together on the other side of the counter to say hello, but she looked perfectly composed. She even seemed to be smiling, something he hadn't known her to do in civilian life. Where in that cloistered academic soul of hers had she found such heroic reserves of sangfroid? Maybe she didn't have enough of a soul to be terrified, he thought meanly. He noticed the way the curved wings of her shoulder blades showed through her thin cardigan.

The library turned out to have been built right into the side of the river valley, making it bigger on the inside than he expected. The far side of the building, the side facing the river, was one single sheet of smoked glass three stories high that looked out on the water. As it descended through the trees the sun shone weakly through the gray-brown translucence, creating dramatic circular lens-flare effects.

After a few minutes Margaret came back and sat down at the terminal next to him. She pretended not to see him.

“You see the circulation desk?” she said quietly, looking only at the screen in front of her. “Follow it with your eyes. Look where it would meet the far wall if it continued on. There's a door there—you can't see it from here because it's paneled wood like the wall, and there's no handle on this side, but it's there. That's the door you'll go through.”

“Okay.”

“I prepared a map for you. I'm going to leave it under the keyboard of this terminal—”

“Oh for fuck's sake,” he snapped. “Just give it to me.”

Margaret hesitated, then slid it to him sideways along the tabletop. It was drawn on the back of a yellow index card.

“There's the desk,” she said. “There's the door.” She could have been a knowledgeable former employee initiating a neophyte researcher in the mysteries of Boolean operators. “If you keep going along that wall there's a room where people hang their coats. If something goes wrong you can pretend you were just heading back there.”

“I didn't bring a coat. It's summer.”

“Well, think of something else.”

“An umbrella?” Edward had never seen a day that looked less like rain in his life.

“If you like. Check your watch. Mine says”—she looked down—“3:47 exactly. The library closes at 5:30. At 5:00, I want you to go up to the front desk and sign us both out at the registry. Then, at 5:05 exactly, I will open the door. You will step through. I will close it after you. If you're late, I won't wait.”

“What if somebody sees me go in?”

“They'll probably assume you belong here. Just look like you know what you're doing.”

As she talked Edward felt like he should at least pretend to use the computer he was sitting at. His fingers automatically typed the word “blimp,” and the search returned a list of memorabilia from famous dirigibles: the
Dixmude,
the
Shenandoah,
the
Hindenburg.
That last seemed like an omen of disaster. We're stealing a book from a library, he thought. A very valuable book. I could lose my job over this.

“Once you're through the door what you do next is very important, because there are cameras in the stacks. Turn left immediately, walk as far as the corner, and wait for me there.”

“Okay.”

A tall man wearing a maroon fez sat down at a terminal opposite from Margaret's, his long, Peloponnesian face ravaged with deep acne scars.

“What should I do till then?” said Edward.

“Try not to be noticed. Consult the reference books. There's usually an exhibit on the second floor, go look at that. If you get in trouble, remember Steinbeck. I have to go now, they're waiting for me in the vault.”

“Fine. Go.”

She hit a key. A dot matrix printer on a nearby table chattered insanely and spewed out paper. She stood up, tore off the printout, and took it up to the circulation desk where she was swiftly ushered back through a swinging gate and then through a doorway into the stacks.

This is unwise,
Edward thought lucidly.
Nothing I could gain by finding the codex could possibly be worth the chance I'm taking

now.
He mentally rephrased and amplified and expanded on this thought in a variety of ways, and in every form it took it seemed equally true, if not truer with every passing second.

What was he going to do for the next hour and thirteen minutes? He looked around furtively at the lobby of the Chenoweth Annex, feeling lost and abandoned. It was almost empty, and the air had the sterile chill he recognized from his visit to the main branch back in the city. The walls were all paneled in pale blond wood. The ceilings were high and lit with lots of teeny-tiny track lights. There was a row of low, comfortable-looking couches along the glass wall facing the river.

The exhibit upstairs turned out to be closed for a private function, so he stood up and went over to a bookcase along one wall. The books were all books about books—bibliographies of obscure literary figures, catalogs of long-dispersed scriptoria, histories of printing and publishing and bindings and typefaces. Taking one down at random,
Twelve Centuries of European Bookbindings 400–1600,
he walked over to one of the couches. He still had the notebook Margaret gave him, and partly to be convincing and partly to relieve the tension he scribbled down some notes on its contents:
The Book of the Dead, Le livre de Lancelot du Lac,
Richard de Bury's
Philobiblon,
Hugh of Saint-Victor's
Didascalicon,
the Samaritan Pentateuch, the Lindisfarne Gospels....

A massive double-decker Rothko hung on the wall to his left, balanced by a brown, two-lobed
mappamundo
on his right. In spite of himself Edward started to relax. There were a few terrifying moments when members of the library staff seemed to be about to say something to him, but none of them ever actually did. He wondered what it would be like to belong here the way Margaret did. Settling back into the overstuffed leather, with the notebook in his lap, he imagined another life for himself as one of these silent scholars, buried in his research like a guinea pig in its wood shavings, nibbling away steadily after some arcane piece of knowledge in the hope of making an addition, however imperceptible, to the collective pile. It wouldn't have been so bad. A summer breeze silently ruffled the coarse green grass that clung to the steep slope of the valley. After a while he stopped even pretending to read. Down below, the river glittered in the late-afternoon sun; it was only the smoked glass of the window that allowed him to look directly at it. A white powerboat was forcing its way vigorously upstream, bouncing across the water, swell by swell, surging against the current, the sun flashing rhythmically off its wet hull.

He looked at his watch again. It was almost five. All the panic that had drained away gradually in the past hour came back in one freezing splash. He shot up out of the couch and looked around. He was the only patron left: The room was empty except for staff. An olive-complected young woman walked by pushing a wooden cart with squeaky wheels. She offered to reshelve the book he'd been reading. He let her take it from his numbed fingers.

Edward sat down again at one of the computer terminals and waited, checking his watch every few seconds. His investor's mind was intimately familiar with the calculus of risk, and it was urgently flagging this expedition as a very bad one. This wasn't making poker bets with somebody else's pin money. This was real life. Sweat prickled on the palms of his hands. The letters on the dusty monitor screen burned a lurid, hallucinatory green. He had to go to the bathroom.

At 5:03 he stood up and walked to the far end of the room. This was it. The time was now. A random phrase from a poem he'd read in college came back to him involuntarily, like acid reflux:
It was no dream. I lay broad waking.
He was suddenly preternaturally aware of his peripheral vision—the walls, the furniture, the faces, everything seemed to be jumping wildly in the corners of his eyes.

He walked parallel to the circulation desk, trying to keep his eyes fixed straight ahead of him. He couldn't have felt more conspicuous if he were walking a tightrope or doing a series of flying
jetés
across the room, though in reality he could barely manage even basic bipedal locomotion, because his arms and legs were suddenly stiff and wooden like a toy soldier's.

A crack opened in the wall in front of him. Inside was nothing but intense blackness. It reminded him of something.

 

THE AIR WAS COLD.
It was pitch dark, and there was an intense smell of damp leather. He could literally see nothing—it was like swimming in a deep sea of oil. He was on the other side. Edward reached out into the darkness and his knuckles clanged painfully against something metal. He turned left, robotically, and started walking, the way Margaret had told him to.

White light flashed behind his eyes, and he reeled backward. He had smacked face-first into a concrete wall. He sat down backward onto somebody's feet.

“Ow!” he whispered hoarsely.

“Ow!” hissed Margaret.

He struggled to get up, and the top of his head caught her hard under the chin. He heard her teeth click together.

“I'm sorry!” he whispered. He put out his hand to reassure her and encountered her breast. He snatched it back.

A door opened on the other side of what was suddenly a large room. Bright light spilled towards them between rows of tall metal bookcases. Then it closed, and he was blind again.

“What's going on?” he said.

“They changed it,” she whispered angrily. She rubbed her chin. “I think they changed the layout. Put up new partitions.”

Edward stood up, more carefully this time. That hadn't felt like a partition. He rubbed his forehead and leaned against what felt like the end of a bookcase.

“Are you sure you remembered right?”

She didn't answer.

“Who was that who opened the door?”

“I don't know.”

Edward's knuckles and forehead throbbed warmly in the chilly air.

“It's cold in here.”

“‘A sunny pleasure-dome, with caves of ice,'” she said oddly, but her voice was reassuringly calm and even again in the darkness. He reached out his hand and this time found her elbow. He held on to it. Together they listened to muffled conversation from the public area, on the other side of the door, suddenly a world away.

“Did you sign us out?” she said suddenly.

“Shit.” Edward made a face that she couldn't see. “No. I forgot.”

“Do it now.”

“I can't go back out there!”

“If we're not signed out there's no point in going through with this. They'll be looking all over for me. For both of us.”

“I think there are still people out there.”

Nevertheless, he felt along the wall with his fingertips until he found a crack, then down the crack until he found the doorknob. As he eased it open a line of light appeared. He pressed his cheek against the rough cinder-block wall and peered out. Miraculously, the coast was now clear.

“All right,” he said. He felt for her warm hand, found three of her fingers and squeezed them. “Promise you'll wait for me.”

“Go.” She pushed him.

Unbelievably, he slipped back out from the safety of the darkness into the light. The late-afternoon sun flooding in through the picture windows was painfully bright now, and he half ran to the circulation desk, stooped over like a doughboy dashing along a trench under enfilading fire. The heavy leather registry book was gone. Fearless now, he went around behind the desk and rummaged through the forbidden boxes of call slips and metal stamps and yellow pencils until he found it. Sitting down cross-legged on the thick carpet, he found their names, signed them out, and tucked the book back where it had been.

He stood up. He felt foolish: The library was empty. There was no one here. He inhaled and let it out in short, open-mouthed breaths:
ha ha ha.
The air-conditioning was so severe he almost expected to see his breath in the air. Somehow the absence of other people made him feel the presence of the books all around him more keenly. He imagined he could hear the rustle of each volume furiously poring over itself, muttering monomaniacally as it reviewed its own contents for all eternity.

Up to this moment, he realized, he hadn't done anything wrong. He was still legally free and clear. There was a line to be crossed, beyond which he would be irrevocably and incontrovertibly entangled, but he hadn't quite crossed it yet. He strolled out from behind the desk, swinging his arms vigorously forward and backward like a swimmer loosening up for the fifty-meter butterfly. That line was very, very near—he could sense it, smell it buzzing dangerously like a downed power line, yards away in space and minutes away in time.

He found himself climbing the shallow flight of steps in the direction of the exit. The sun was starting to set behind the red cliffs on the far side of the Hudson, and beams of light streamed sideways through the room, making Giacometti shadows spring from his feet and from those of two librarians he passed on their way in, a man and a woman, chatting about nothing, a party for the library's donors upstairs, perfectly unsuspecting. Nothing was keeping him here, he thought. He could still walk out if he wanted to. The freedom of it was tempting. Maybe this whole thing was all part of somebody else's story—Margaret's, the Duchess's, somebody's, not his. He could leave now, get on a bus, be back in Manhattan by nightfall. He felt bad about Margaret, but she still had the car, and she'd be better off without him, they both knew it. He pushed open the double doors at the end of the hall and stepped out onto the gravel path.