Codex (20 page)

“But what?” she said, clipped. “You want to know what you'll get paid, is that it?”

That wasn't it, not at all. But he didn't say so.

“You'll get paid what you earn,” she said, answering her own question. He could hear her smile, suddenly sweet. “Don't try to contact me, I'll call you in a week.”

Then she was gone.

I
T WAS LATE AFTERNOON
the next day when the phone rang again. Sitting at his desk, staring at the
Financial Times
Web site without reading it, Edward let the answering machine get it.

“Edward, it's Margaret. Please pick up.”

She wasn't whispering, but there was a hushed urgency to her voice. Edward sat on the arm of the couch and picked up the phone.

“Margaret,” he said coolly. “How are you?”

“I think I've found something,” she said.

“How exciting for you.”

“But I need your help.”

“You do.”

He stood up and walked over to the window. He still resented Margaret for blindsiding him so effectively over the Wents' key, even though a part of him was grateful for it. He decided to show his resentment by completely suppressing any of the excitement he felt at the sound of her voice. At the back of his mind, he also knew that every minute he stayed on the phone with her he was giving up a degree of plausible deniability that could be useful down the line, if their little ruse was ever discovered.

There had been a cloudburst, a momentary break in the heat wave, and the pavement outside was dark with wet gray stains like vast, unexplored continents.

“Where are you?” he asked.

“Where do you think I am? I'm in the Wents' apartment.” She managed to convey wintry contempt without changing her tone of voice in the slightest. “Can you come here? I need some things.”

“I'm sorry, I don't think that's such a good idea right now.”

There was a long silence. He relished the inversion of their power dynamic, however temporary it might be. Edward watched an old woman wearing a yellow raincoat ride by on an old bicycle.

“Why can't you get them yourself?”

“Because I don't think I should leave the apartment right now,” she said. “I had some trouble getting past the doorman this morning. I was forced to prevaricate.”

“What do you need?”

“Do you have a pen? I need a soft toothbrush, some wooden toothpicks, some mineral oil—Swan is the best—a can of compressed air if you can find one, a soft cloth, and a tack hammer. And a flashlight.”

“Is that all?”

“Yes.” If she was aware of his sarcasm, she didn't show it. “You know what a tack hammer is?”

“I know what a tack hammer is.”

They were silent for a few more seconds. A dog barked in the street. The day hung in the balance, massive weights balanced on either side, like a tanker truck poised halfway off a cliff in a cartoon, waiting for a hummingbird to alight on the bumper. He sighed.

“I don't have a key,” he said. “You'll have to meet me downstairs.”

“I'll be in the lobby in exactly one hour.”

She made him synchronize their watches.

 

THIS TIME WHEN
Edward passed the doorman he was positive he'd be stopped, but he just kept walking and tried to look self-assured and nothing happened. The man in the seedy livery never looked up from his Arabic newspaper, which he read with the aid of a magnifying glass. It was after six in the evening. Edward was carrying a bulky shopping bag.

A couple of table lamps were on in the lobby. He'd never seen it with the lights on, and it was surprisingly tawdry: a cracked marble endtable, an oriental carpet worn down to a grid of coarse burlap. A hint of stale cigar smoke hung in the air, left over from cigars that had been smoked in the 1950s. Margaret was standing by the elevators, looking very tall and thin. Her face was stony.

When she saw him she pressed the elevator button without a word. They waited in silence until it came.

“I wasn't sure you were coming,” she said gravely, after the doors had closed. Then, with an obvious effort: “Thank you.”

“I wish I hadn't.” Edward listened to the rumble of the machinery as they went up. “You're sure this is safe?”

She nodded.

“There's no one here. The cleaning woman left at three.”

They stood shoulder to shoulder, staring straight ahead like two anonymous corporate drones on their way to the same meeting. They bumped shoulders getting out, and Edward stood aside and gestured for her to go first with exaggerated gallantry. She ignored him. The lights were off in the apartment.

He stepped gingerly onto the soft oriental carpet and then froze. Abruptly, and with no warning, he lost his nerve. He felt like a man whose foot was resting, gently but quite definitely, on an unexploded land mine. This was not a good place to be.

Margaret didn't look at him, just kept walking. He watched her back disappear down the hallway toward the stairs, her footsteps fading. All at once he found himself running after her pathetically, a puppy desperate not to be left behind.

“There's something I have to show you,” she said, when he caught up. “Something I found when I started clearing out those crates.”

“How long have you been here?”

“Since this morning.”

“You've been here all
day?
”

“I came at six, before they were up.”

They stopped at the tiny door that led to the spiral staircase, and he followed her up the steps. She ran her hand familiarly along the railing, as if she'd already been up and down it a thousand times.

“They were here earlier,” she said. She gripped the doorknob, braced herself, and threw her weight backward. The heavy door jerked open with a crunching sound. “In the apartment. Or somebody was. I heard people talking. There was a man speaking in an English accent. But nobody came up here.”

“Really? Did you overhear them planning a murder?”

Stepping through the doorway into the cool air of the library was like slipping into a pool of deliciously cold water. His sarcasm suddenly seemed overdone, and it vanished into the stillness. Margaret took off her shoes—sensible mary janes—and set them neatly aside. She wore dark stockings. He caught a glimpse of her pale heel where one of them was worn through.

“I don't want anybody to hear us walking around,” she explained.

She'd been working. The bookshelves were now full, and she'd laid down wrapping paper on the floor along the entire length of one wall. It was covered with stacks of books. All the wooden crates were now open, and the edges of the bookshelves were thickly furred with color-coded stickies. On the table were the laptop, Margaret's notebook, three cans of Diet Coke, and a crumpled-up, half-empty bag of fat free extra-dark pretzels, unsalted.

“Well,” said Edward. “You've been busy. I hope you're not billing me for this.”

“I've gone through approximately two-thirds of the collection, and I've glanced at the rest of it. I've arranged them by period and country, then alphabetically. I keep my notes in longhand, but I put a basic catalog on the computer as well.”

Edward walked over to the table where the laptop was sitting. A window of the Wents' cataloging program was open. He ran a quick search for “Gervase” in the database, but nothing came back. It wasn't going to be that easy.

“So,” he said curtly. “What did you want to show me?”

“When I got here this morning I wanted to at least unwrap and open all the books and do a cursory inspection.”

“So you did.”

“Yes, I did. Look at this, it's particularly fine.” She picked up a small book bound in highly wrought leather. The cover was stamped with hundreds of tiny repeating swirls and squiggles and flourishes, arranged into squares and rectangles. “Italo-Greek. After Constantinople fell in 1453 some Greek book-binders set themselves up in Italy. They created their own highly distinctive decorative aesthetic. Look, the text is actually in English.”

She opened the book. The handwriting was a cramped mix of pointy angles and looping flourishes. Edward couldn't read it.

“What is it?”

“It's a fishing handbook, fifteenth century.
The Treatyse of Fishing with an Angle.
”

“Is this what you wanted me to see?” Edward looked over at the door nervously.

“No,” she said, setting it aside. “This is.”

She indicated a blank page torn out of her notebook lying flat on the tabletop. On the page was gathered a collection of tiny scraps of paper, four or five of them, hardly more than flakes. Some of them had fragments of writing on them, random shards of shattered black letters.

Edward squinted at them.

“What is this?”

“Paper,” she said, deadpan. “I found these chips down at the bottom of one of the crates after I cleared the books out. If you hold some of them up to the light you can see fragments of a watermark.”

She paused, evidently expecting him to look for himself, but he didn't bother.

“And?”

“I recognized it. It's a known watermark, a boar's head and a flower. You can look it up in the
Dictionnaire historique des marques du papier
and find out when and where the paper was made. In this case the answer is Basel, around 1450. The texture is also distinctive—you can see here the laid lines”—she indicated one long fragment with her finger—“and here the chain lines, wider apart. Quite crude, in this case, not an aristocrat's paper, but I recognize the text from the fragments: It's Lydgate's
Life of Our Lady,
late fifteenth century. Terrible stuff, like medieval Jerry Falwell, but it would be a huge find. There are no complete copies in existence.”

“Huh,” he said, grudgingly impressed.

“But the book itself isn't here.”

Margaret turned to the thick old volume he'd looked at on his first day, the locked book that had its own case. She rested her pale hand on the rough, dark cover.

“This is the only book I haven't been able to examine. Based on the external evidence, it fits the text and the period, although the binding's a little fancy for Lydgate.”

Edward sat down on the edge of the table, which crackled loudly under his weight.

“Great. So here's Lydgate. Where's Gervase?”

She frowned a little and cocked her head, miming incomprehension.

“Gervase,” he repeated. “You know, the
Viage
to the Whatever of the Whoever.”

“Edward,” Margaret said evenly. “I'm not working for you anymore. That arrangement is over. So please listen to me: There is no
Viage,
and the sooner you accept that and stop looking for it the better.”

Their eyes met. He held her gaze long enough to hope that she thought what she was saying was sinking in.

“So what am I doing here?”

“You're here because Lydgate's
Life of Our Lady
is a rare book of immense value, and if this is it, I need your help to get it open. Did you bring the things I asked for?”

Edward picked up the shopping bag and set it on the table.

“I couldn't get a flashlight.” Actually, he had one in his apartment, but he'd left it at home it out of sheer mulishness. She sorted out the items and lined them up along the edge of the table like a surgeon preparing to operate.

“What were you shopping for at Henri Bendel?” she inquired conversationally. It was the name on the shopping bag. Edward was surprised—it was her first attempt at anything resembling small talk.

“Christmas presents. It was a long time ago.”

A vivid memory flared up of his first winter in New York: wandering up and down Fifth Avenue in mid-December, freezing rain, forcing his way through crowds of shoppers on the wet sidewalk, mob-strength crowds big enough and surly enough to have stormed a castle. He was looking for a Christmas present for his mother, and after three hours in one of the top three or four shopping neighborhoods in the world he still hadn't come up with anything that wasn't either too cheap or too expensive or too romantic to be appropriate. His feet were killing him, and his wool overcoat wasn't waterproof and smelled like a wet sheep, and he was painfully aware of not having a girlfriend to advise him about things like this. In a state of desperate exhaustion he wound up with a camel-colored cashmere cardigan from Henri Bendel, which he had brought home in this very same shopping bag. His mother adored it.

Edward had brought an old flannel shirt for Margaret to use as a soft cloth. She laid it out flat, its arms spread on either side, and set the old book on it like a baby ready to be diapered. At her request he dragged the floor lamp over closer to where she was working. She bent down and peered at the rusted, fused knot of metal that had been the lock.

“Why not just cut it open?” said Edward from a safe distance. “I mean, saw through the wood?”

“Too invasive. Last resort.” She set to work picking at it with two toothpicks, one in each hand, pausing once in a while to blow out the accumulated rust flakes with the compressed air. “It's already been damaged enough. Those scraps of paper are a bad sign as it is.”

“How long do you think it's been locked?”

She made a noncommittal noise.

“Under the right conditions rust like this can form relatively quickly. Do we know when the books were crated?”

“Not exactly,” said Edward. “Or wait—yes, we do. Some of the books are packed in newspapers. Check the dates on the newspapers, and...” He tapped the side of his nose with his forefinger.

“Clever. Would you mind doing that, please?”

The newspapers were all from late 1938 and early 1939. Margaret dropped the toothpicks and began scrubbing the latch very gently with the toothbrush.

He watched her work for another minute—now she was wetting the toothbrush with mineral oil—then decided to take a stroll around the library. At the first footstep he realized he hadn't taken off his shoes the way she had, so he dropped to one knee and untied his black leather oxfords. He set them beside hers. The gesture felt incongruously intimate.