Codex (21 page)

“I have this friend who's a paleoclimatologist,” he said at random, to nobody in particular. “Studies the history of weather. He goes around looking for ancient samples of air so he can check the levels of oxygen and carbon dioxide in them.” He crossed his arms to feel warmer in the chilly air. “He found some air from 300 B.c. once. It was trapped inside a hollow clay button.”

He felt conscious of being alone in a darkened room with Margaret, both of them in their socks, both of them implicated together in this furtive, clandestine activity. He was coming to appreciate her unconventional charms, in particular her outlandishly distinguished nose and the long, slender legs she was so careful not to flaunt, like a secret pair of wings that she had to keep concealed at all costs. As he walked around the room he picked up a book here and there from the tops of the tall, wobbly stacks along the wall. He glanced at the title pages before carefully replacing them. A thick science fiction novel in Cyrillic, printed on grim gray Soviet paper. A volume of Ben Franklin's autobiography bound in red cloth (“I have ever had pleasure in obtaining any little anecdotes of my ancestors...”). When he reached the window he drew the curtain back with one finger and looked out at the dusky city with its lights just starting to come on, yellow and white and rose and the thousand different colors of thousands of different drawn curtains.

When he came back to the table Margaret had stopped working. She examined the rusted lock again from various angles, holding the tack hammer cocked back in her right hand. Then she tenderly folded one sleeve of the flannel shirt over the lock, steadied it with her free hand, and tapped it once, firmly. Edward couldn't see any change, but when she dropped the hammer and pulled back the sleeve, the catch opened easily.

They were both wrong: It wasn't Lydgate, and it wasn't Gervase. It wasn't a book at all. The cover swung open to reveal the corpse of a book, or the grave of one. It was hollow: The centers of the pages had been cut or carefully ripped out, leaving only an inch of blank margins on all sides and a void in the center. It had been disbound, and this was what was left, the hollow rind.

When Edward leaned over it he saw that the margins weren't totally blank. Traces of ink remained, motes and specks and single pixels of color: the black of text, but also rich Pompeian reds, fresh greens, deep welkin blues, and a very few precious flecks of gold.

“T
HERE WERE ORIGINALLY
twelve crates of books,” Margaret said, later that same night.

She was sitting on the wide windowsill of Laura Crowlyk's office with cardboard boxes of papers piled up on either side of her and on the floor around her stocking feet. Every few minutes she forgot where she was and leaned back against the venetian blinds, which made a horrible clashing noise, and snapped erect again. It was getting very late, after one in the morning. What had started as a casual and more or less constitutional plain-view search of Laura Crowlyk's office on their way to the elevators had turned into an exhausting, exhaustive, and deeply ill-advised itemization of every piece of paper it contained.

“Eleven. I counted.” After two hours of sitting cross-legged on the carpet, Edward's ass was on fire and his back felt like an S-curved length of red-hot cable.

“There were twelve, not eleven, according to this bill of lading. It's signed by Cruttenden.”

“You found the actual bill of lading?”

She continued to study the document in silence, so he heaved himself up and went to stand next to her. The paper—which bore an elaborate baronial crest encrusted with hippogriffs—was headed
THE MACMILLAN GRAND INTERNATIONAL TRANSATLANTIC SHIPPING COMPANY
and described twelve crates of similar sizes and weights, the contents of which were listed simply as
DRY GOODS
. It was dated August 7, 1939. They were brought over on a ship called the
Muir.

“I guess that's it,” he said, after a while. “What kind of a word is ‘lading' anyway? Why not ‘loading'?”

“It's Middle English. An archaism.”

The room was lit only by Laura's desk lamp because Edward was worried that somebody would notice a light from outside. The air-conditioning was off, and the room was hot and muggy. Edward blotted his forehead with his arm. Margaret's hair was becoming unruly.

“All right then, so we're short one box,” he sighed, settling to the floor again. “Any idea what happened to it?”

“No. Can you ask her?”

“Who?”

“Laura,” said Margaret. “The woman whose office we are currently burglarizing.”

He shook his head. “No. We can't let her know we're still interested in the collection. And certainly not that we've seen the actual bill of lading. Although—” He bit his lip—it was supposed to be a secret—then confessed. “The Duchess called me last night. I wonder if she knows.”

“The Duchess of Bowmry called you?”

“Uh-huh.” He did his level best to imply that he conversed with Blanche, and possibly other members of the English peerage, on a regular basis.

“And?”

“And what?”

“Can she help us?”

“I don't know,” he said, blushing for no reason he could think of. “It wasn't that kind of conversation. There's a lot I don't know about her yet.”

If Margaret felt any further curiosity about his conversation with the Duchess, she kept it to herself.

Laura Crowlyk's office had been disorderly before, but now it was a full-scale clerical catastrophe. Every available surface was covered with stacks of papers stuffed into every imaginable species of receptacle: manila folders, three-ring binders, cardboard pouches, weathered albums, shoe boxes, hatboxes, wooden trays, leather portfolios tied up with velvet ribbons. Most of the papers related to the apartment itself—taxes, insurance, estimates and bills for maintenance and repairs. Edward sifted through Laura's inbox. Its contents were utterly uninteresting: a lengthy correspondence with an airline over some lost green leather luggage.

The air was swirling with stirred-up dust, and Edward had to stop for a couple of minutes for a sneezing fit out in the hall. When he came back in he put the heels of his hands over his burning eyes and yawned.

“Which is better,” he said. “A count or an earl?”

“What?”

“Counts or earls. Which is better?”

“Neither. An earl is what the English call a count, and a count is the Continental equivalent of an earl. The order of the English nobility is: baron, viscount, earl, marquess, duke, king.”

Edward stretched.

“I'm going. I have to sleep.”

“All right.” Margaret went back to her reading.

“Are you going to stay here?” he said.

“For a while.”

“All right.”

Edward lingered in the doorway. He could hardly keep his eyes open, but he felt guilty for leaving her there. He didn't completely trust her alone in the Wents' apartment, either.

“You've been here for eighteen hours straight. Don't you have classes to teach or something?”

“Not in the summer.” She sat up and stretched too, her narrow shoulder blades straining behind her through her sweater, and Edward involuntarily dropped his gaze to her slight bust. Oblivious, she kinked her long neck left, then right, popping it once on each side. “And I have a fellowship this year to work on my dissertation. I won't be teaching this fall anyway.”

“How's that going?”

“My dissertation?”

She bent over her work again.

“That's not considered a polite question in academic circles.”

“Okay.” He leaned against the doorframe in what he hoped was a jaunty, insouciant pose and crossed his arms. “How did you get here, anyway? I mean, what made you decide to become an academic?”

She sighed, but she didn't pause at all in the rhythm of her scanning and sorting. Apparently she was capable of maintaining the bare minimum of social niceties while the rest of her brain continued with the task at hand.

“I was home-schooled. My father worked in the Patent and Trademark Office. My mother spent most of her time on my education. They're very Christian, and I'm an only child, and I spent most of my time growing up reading. When I was fourteen my father died, and my mother became increasingly preoccupied with my...my moral development. I started taking classes at a local community college. It doesn't seem like much, but I suppose it was my way of rebelling. The curriculum was fairly rudimentary, and after a year an English professor there suggested I transfer to U. Penn. When I finished there I came to Columbia as a graduate student.”

Edward pictured Margaret's mother: an iron-haired, harsh-featured version of her daughter, her pale hand clutching a metal crucifix.

He had meant to leave, but instead Edward sat down again on the edge of the desk. He leafed halfheartedly through a thick, overstuffed manila folder labeled
CORRESPONDENCE.
Inside was a hodgepodge of miscellaneous letters, smudgy carbon copies of trivial business communications and thank-you notes. He stared at them irritably. Suddenly they seemed useless, primitive—crude ink scratchings on pressed wood pulp. What he wanted was a celestial keyboard, with which he could enter a query and search through the papers the way you could search a hard drive. Better yet, he thought, he should be able to go to the window, open the blinds, type “
FIND SECRET BOOK
” and search the entire city. That's what he needed. Reality felt distinctly obsolete compared to the digital alternative.

Still, something about one of the letters nagged at him. He went back and reread it.

“Look at this,” he said.

“What.” She didn't look up from the document she was scanning.

“It's a letter from the Duke—the old Duke. It must be the father of the current one. It's to the Chenoweth.”

“Let me see it.”

He handed it to her, and they read it together.

 

Henry La Farge has informed me that facilities for the display of materials donated to the library in spring 1941 have not been constructed nor as I understand it have preparations for the construction of those facilities been undertaken. While I
understand that an institution such as the Chenoweth has limited funds available to it you will understand if I express some concern over the lack of progress to date. Please respond at your earliest convenience with a full description of your preparations for the construction of those facilities and a preliminary timetable for the construction of those facilities.

 

It was dated 1953 and signed by the Duke of Bowmry.

“He's no Gervase of Langford,” said Edward.

“He's not even a Lydgate.” Margaret set the letter aside on the desk. “All right. Let's suppose that's it. Let's suppose the Wents sent that twelfth box as a donation to the Chenoweth.”

“Let's suppose.” Edward went to an uncomfortable wooden chair in the corner of the room and sat down. Then the implications of the letter dawned on him, and he felt all the remaining energy drain out of him. Stifling a yawn, he slumped down so that the small of his back rested on the very edge of the chair. “All right. So the old Duke gave the twelfth box to the Chenoweth.” Margaret watched him. “All right.”

“Well, that settles it, doesn't it? It's another red herring.” He ran his hands through his short hair. “If the codex were there, then they'd have it, and it would be famous, and everybody would know about it. Or you would, at least. And that would be that. But you don't know about it, so it's not there, end of story. Right?”

She didn't answer, just nodded thoughtfully. Horns honked blocks away and far below them, softened by distance so that they sounded almost musical. It was hot in the room, and Edward was hungry. He hadn't eaten since midday.

“It's possible,” said Margaret, looking thoughtful. “But there's no Went room at the Chenoweth.”

I'm sorry?

“There's no Went room at the Chenoweth. The Duke's letter implies that when they made the donation, the Wents stipulated that some sort of special facilities would have to be built to house it. Unless I'm mistaken, that hasn't happened.”

“So—what?” said Edward irritably. “What am I missing?”

Margaret shook her head.

“You don't understand how libraries work. People donate vast quantities of books and papers to the Chenoweth all the time, sometimes entire estates worth, most of which are either of questionable value or none at all.”

She stood up and began returning the office to a semblance of its former state.

“Evaluating and processing donations is extremely labor-intensive. If a book is obviously valuable and legally free and clear it might go directly onto the shelves, but more often it takes months or even years, and there's always a backlog. In a case like the Wents' donation, where the materials are encumbered with secondary financial conditions, it can take decades. In fact the Chenoweth has every incentive
not
to catalog them, so instead it buries them in a vault somewhere and hopes for some kind of change in the situation. A death, a new generation of heirs who might ameliorate the conditions of the bequest, or forget about them. Anything. Libraries live a long time, and time only makes books more valuable.”

“So you think the twelfth box could still be buried in the backlog? After fifty years?”

“The current administration probably doesn't even know it's there. In fact, it probably made a point of forgetting.”

Margaret was a wizard with paper. As she talked she squared off dusty stacks and realphabetized files and corralled stray sheets like a cardsharp shuffling and dealing.

“You have no idea what the Chenoweth vaults are like,” she said. “Trunks and suitcases and bags and cardboard boxes stuffed with love letters and doodles and phone messages written on grocery bags, all of which may or may not be more or less tied up in pending legal disputes, none of which has ever been formally inventoried. And the books are the least of it. The walls are stacked to the rafters with paintings and beaver skins and old firearms and locks of hair that no one even knows how to properly care for. Once a colleague of mine found a beat-up old armchair in a corner of the vault and took it back to his apartment. It sat in the corner for six months before he noticed a tag on the back: It was Robert Louis Stevenson's writing chair. A couple of years ago somebody found Dante's ashes in a library in Florence. They'd been sitting on an upper shelf in a back room for seventy years.”