Codex (41 page)

But still the game went on. He ducked and dipped his way deeper into the grove, spilling branchloads of snow on himself. Isn't this where he came in? he thought. Maybe he could get out the same way. He'd messed up this world, now he'd just quietly slip out the back exit and try again in a new one. Better luck next time. But no, it was just trees and more trees. He put his hands on his hips and gazed up at the blank gray dome of the sky. Well, it was a puzzle, but you know what? He was tired of solving other people's problems, jumping through their hoops, prying into their secrets. He was tired of his own secrets, too. He took a deep breath: good, dry, crisp cold air.

Dawn came on, and snow began to fall. It fell and fell, light dry flakes, not the big mushy stuff that never sticks, that melts into slush before it has a chance to mount up into the big, solid drifts you really need. This was the good stuff, and it showed no sign of stopping. He leaned on the familiar white porch railing, brushing off the skim of snow that had already collected there, and looked out over the frozen river. It was all so pleasantly familiar, and why not? This was where he grew up. Apparently time had raced so far forward that it had looped back on itself, because here he was back in Maine again, and his father was alive, and his parents were still together.
Maybe I won the game after all,
he reflected, his dream-self formulating hazy dream-thoughts,
and this is my reward.

He needed only one more thing before he was completely happy, and it was on its way. He watched the snow fall and listened to the special hush it brought with it. It was almost a sure thing now. There was no possible way there could be school tomorrow.

 

A BELL RANG.
Edward opened his eyes. The
FASTEN SEATBELTS
sign was on. The plane was beginning its descent into Heathrow.

Something wonderful was happening inside him. He took a deep breath to try to calm himself down, but he couldn't stop grinning. He couldn't help it. He couldn't remember the last time he genuinely couldn't wait for something to happen. He wished he could stop time, prolong this gentle, stomach-lifting descent forever, the better to savor the anticipation. He stood up and hefted the bag with the codex in it down from the luggage rack and held it in his lap, feeling its reassuring solidity. The plane banked over the London suburbs. His window flooded full of sleeping gray roofs and scurrying white headlights.

Five minutes later they were on the ground. The plane taxied to the gate, and a line of disembarking passengers formed. Edward shouldered his bags and joined them. It was a relief just to stand up. His knees ached deliciously. By New York time it was only nine in the evening, but it was two in the morning in London. Outside in the waiting area everything looked subtly different and European. The payphones were red and white, and there were complicated, high-tech cigarette machines all along the walls. The snack bar had a fully alcoholic wet bar behind it. Beards were plentiful, and everybody seemed to have a cell phone and sunglasses.

Edward was in no hurry. He stood by the gate and waited while the crowd streamed out of the plane around him. Like all airports, Heathrow was rich in arrows and signs, branching trails, forking paths, into which his anonymous fellow travelers busily sorted themselves. They passed him by as if he were just one of them, just part of the crowd, instead of somebody with a critical and highly secret mission to carry out. He was ready to join the general flood, to allow himself to be swept along and sorted, but he paused for just a minute. He was in no hurry. He could afford to take his time. He watched silent news on a TV suspended from the ceiling. Across the room a figure in the exiting crowd caught his eye.

A tall, willowy young woman was struggling determinedly across the floor of the waiting area with a heavy bag. Her nose was long and interestingly curved, and her straight dark brown hair swung at chin-length as she walked. She had no particular expression on her face, but the naturally downturned corners of her mouth gave her a melancholy look.

He watched her cross the carpet to where a man was waiting for her at the far end of the gate area. Edward had seen him before. He was tall and handsome, an older man with a stiff brush of white hair. He was very thin, almost haggard, as if he'd recently recovered from a serious illness, but his posture was ramrod-straight. When Margaret reached him he took her bag and hefted it easily up onto his shoulder with a single muscular gesture. His pink cheeks glowed with rude health. A silvery bell rang, and a rapid-fire voice spoke dispassionately over the loudspeaker. After a cursory exchange Margaret and the Duke of Bowmry left the gate together through the exit marked
CUSTOMS.

Edward watched them go from where he stood. It was strange, but he couldn't move. It was as if a colorless, tasteless toxin had entered his body, the silent sting of an invisible jellyfish, and left him completely paralyzed. He stood where he was, observing them from a distance. He couldn't take it in yet. It was just colors and shapes, which his mind couldn't translate into anything that made sense.

Then they were gone, headed toward customs, and his paralysis vanished, replaced by fear, fear of what he knew was already happening, had already happened. Only then did his body jump into action. As he walked a part of his brain kept up a neutral commentary on what was going on. He wanted his brain to grapple with this new mystery, to wrestle it into the shape of something bearable, but it refused to leave its corner, was in fact desperately trying to climb out of the ring. Everything around him was very clear and sharp, like a mosaic of broken glass. There was no time. He should really say something. He needed inspiration, a tactical masterstroke that would reverse the situation—not just reverse it but make it so it never happened, explain it and neutralize it and make everything all right again in one fell swoop. She must have thought I was getting a later flight, he thought. She wouldn't have wanted me to see this. He felt like a camera with its shutter stuck open—he couldn't shut it off, couldn't turn away, couldn't stop taking it all in.

For a long moment he thought he'd lost them in the crowd, but then they reappeared in the line at Passport Control. He tried to catch Margaret's eye, but the angle was bad, and she was wearing sunglasses, which he'd never seen her do before. They looked terrible on her—they made her look blind more than anything else. She said something to the Duke, and he searched his pockets solicitously and handed her a fresh handkerchief. Edward could hardly look at her—her outline shimmered, she was an incandescent sunspot of pain. She didn't understand. He needed to warn her.

“Margaret.” he said. Then he shouted, “Margaret!”

Ten thousand people turned around to stare at him. Margaret glanced in his direction and looked away hurriedly. A uniformed agent approached the Duke, they spoke, and he and Margaret stepped out of the line. They disappeared through a separate doorway, bypassing the crowd completely. He watched them go, one hand raised like a man frozen in the act of hailing a cab. There was a sudden commotion at one of the customs windows as a child—no, an unusually small man—tried to force his way through the line and was vigorously restrained by two uniformed customs officials who had no trouble overpowering him. They escorted him away.

Suddenly Edward's bags felt very heavy. He found a bench and sat down. Some urgent action was still required, some input on his part; an inner alarm was ringing more and more insistently with every passing second, but he didn't know what to do or how to shut it off. It seemed incredible to him that time was still rolling forward at all, that this new development hadn't brought it to a shuddering halt, with a grinding noise and a smell of burning insulation. His brain mechanically catalogued meaningless details in the comfortingly dull airport corridor: ads for Lucky Strikes and Campari, patterns of speckles in the linoleum floor. His nose itched. Outside on the runway, workmen were doing something to an exposed truck engine under the glare of a spotlight. He stared at it till it hurt, deliberately making afterimages on his retina. They looked like balls of blue fire.

A meaningless echoing racket in the background gradually resolved itself into the sound of a man's voice speaking over the PA system. He forced himself to understand it.

It was calling his name.

 

ASTOUNDINGLY, DESPITE
everything, the crude mechanisms of real life were still functioning at maximum efficiency, turning and slicing, shunting and processing. A series of painted arrows, courteous officials, and gratifyingly rapid lines whirled him through customs and out into the receiving area. A chauffeur with the usual crudely lettered sign was there to meet him at the baggage claim. It was his old friend the driver with the weak chin, wearing a stylish leather jacket over a ludicrously inappropriate cable-knit turtleneck sweater. Another man, a debonair footman who looked uncannily like Clark Gable, took his bags. They didn't speak to him, or to each other for that matter, just led him down to an underground garage full of heady gasoline fumes. A midnight-blue limousine waited there, a feline Daimler-Benz crouching on gleaming spokework paws. He was ushered decorously into the back seat, while they sat together in the front. The car started with a genteel cough.

They drove him north out of the city, through darkened suburbs with half-familiar names—Windsor, Watford, Hempstead, Luton—into the countryside north of London. Edward felt like he'd been sitting down for days, and his ass was starting to hurt. He did his best to keep his mind studiously blank. At that moment there were no possible avenues of thought he was even remotely interested in exploring. He wondered what lie the Duke had told Margaret about what he'd do with the codex, how he wanted to preserve it, would let her write about it, would treat it as the national treasure it was. How could she be so brilliant and so naive at the same time? The Duke would shred it as soon as he could, of course, just as he told Fabrikant he would.

They drove for hours. The stars were startlingly bright this far from the city, but he didn't bother to admire them. He didn't get out when they stopped for a cigarette or for gas, or petrol, or whatever it was. He didn't register the heavenly smell of leather and sweet tobacco in the back seat of the car. Instead he just stared straight ahead at the seat back in front of him, or closed his eyes and tried to doze. In his now-rumpled black suit and his good white shirt, half untucked and open at the collar, he looked like a disheveled guest on his way home from a long and utterly disastrous party.

In spite of his best efforts, Edward's thoughts wandered ahead to his imminent arrival at Weymarshe, and the inevitable practical difficulties. Would she even let him in without the book? He tried to picture it. The Duchess would look up from where she sat curled on a Sun King sofa with a blank, annoyed expression on her face as the butler announced his name. How dare he show his face at Weymarshe now? Or maybe it wouldn't be so bad, he thought, as the Daimler-Benz whisked him ever closer. He was on the losing team, but so was the Duchess. They were in it together. She still had her money, and that counted for something, right? And she was in nominal possession of Weymarshe, while the Duke was still in London. It was a setback, but not a disaster, not a deal breaker. It was time for the Duchess to retrench, rally her forces, reconsider her options, and he could help with that. She needed a sympathetic ear and a fresh set of eyes, now more than ever. He forced himself to take a deep breath, and some of the tightness in his chest eased up. Maybe it would all be all right after all.

He played the scene of his arrival again in his mind, but this time she answered the door herself (the servants having already gone to bed) in an evening gown, with cocktails in both hands, the light glowing through them from behind. The codex had only been a passing fancy, she confessed, just an aristocratic whim, that's all, nothing more. She was horrified at his distress. Think nothing of it. She would dismiss it with her musical laugh, with a playful kiss on the cheek. Never speak of it again. Drink up. Cheers.

An ambulance howled past going the other way with its dismal, dopplered, off-key European siren. It made him uncomfortable. Suddenly it felt like the car was crawling along, like they were moving backward or driving on an endless treadmill, past a revolving set of cardboard hills and plywood houses and the same hedges over and over again.

After an eternity the car finally slowed down, then drew up at a gate. White gravel popped and crackled under the tires. It was the moment before dawn, the moon had set and the sky was glowing blue. A spasm of doubt and self-preservation gripped him. What was he getting himself into? He couldn't face her yet. It was too soon, he wasn't ready. Before they could go through the gate Edward grabbed the door handle, jerked open the car door, and jumped out.

It took him a couple of stutter-steps to find his feet. The air outside was unexpectedly cold and brisk, and the shock revived him a little. It was the first fresh air he'd breathed since he got on the plane in New York twelve hours ago, and just inhaling it made him feel calmer. The gleaming car immediately scraped to a stop beside him.

Edward straightened up and looked around almost calmly, getting his bearings. A high, dense hedge surrounded the property, looking like it could have turned back a German tank, with the top of a crumbling brick crenellation visible just above it. What was he doing? Should he call for help? Just walk away? A whispered conference was taking place in the front seat of the Daimler-Benz. The chauffeur rolled down his window halfway.

“Shall I wait, sir?” he inquired politely.

The other man—Clark Gable—got out on the passenger's side, his jacket still unfairly neat and crisp after the long drive. He looked at Edward across the car's smooth, glossy roof with an expression of mild concern.

“Shall we run you ‘round to the front of the house, sir?” he asked. “It's a fair ways. Take you half an hour at least on foot.”