Codex (2 page)

“Laura Crowlyk. Twenty-third floor.”

“If you are insisting.” His bad English seemed to be a private joke that gave him a certain amount of satisfaction. “Nem pliz?”

“Edward Wozny.”

The doorman stepped into a tiny alcove to the right of the doorway. It had a little wooden stool in it and an antiquated-looking intercom, all black knobs and Scotch tape and old yellowed slips of paper. He pressed a button and leaned down to speak into a grille. Edward couldn't hear the answer, but the man nodded and motioned him inside.

“I cannot stop you!”

The lobby was unexpectedly dark after the brightness of the day outside. He had a fleeting impression of dark wood and cigar smoke, shabby red oriental rugs and mirrored squares on the walls that were imperfectly fitted together. It was a once-grand building gone to seed. The instant he pressed the elevator button a bell rang and the doors shuddered open. It was a minute or two before he reached the twenty-third floor. Edward took the time to straighten his tie and shoot his cuffs.

When the doors opened again he found himself in a bright anteroom, as sunny and airy and open as the lobby had been dark and shabby, with white walls and a hard, polished wood floor. Opposite him his reflection appeared in a full-length mirror with a heavy gilt frame, its face misted over with age. He checked his appearance. Edward was tall and skinny, young-looking for his age—twenty-five—with sharp, pale features. His hair was short and very black, and his eyebrows ran in two thin, high curves that gave him a slightly startled expression at all times. He practiced his banker's face: pleasant, well-meaning, attentive, with a touch of sympathy—not too much—and a shadow of gravity.

A battered old umbrella stand stood in one corner, upholstered in some exotic-looking reptile skin. He imagined the beast that had donated its hide, shot long ago in some obscure tropical colony by a cartoon safari hunter with a pith hat and a blunderbuss. A pair of French doors opened onto the apartment proper. Edward let himself into a spacious sitting room. A sturdy young black woman in an apron was fussing with some knickknacks on an end table. She turned around, startled.

“Hi,” Edward said.

“You here to see Laura?” she said, already backing away. Edward nodded.

She hurried away. Edward took up a position on the edge of an enormous and complicated oriental rug. Sunlight streamed in through a pair of impressively tall windows. The room's opulence was pleasantly at odds with the building's gritty exterior; it was like stumbling onto a secret pasha's hideaway. The ceiling was high and white, and there were some side tables standing against the walls, set with vases full of elaborate arrangements of dried flowers. In a small but expensive-looking painting, a pointillist person sculled.

“Is that Edward?”

It was a woman's voice, a low alto with a light English accent. He turned around. Laura Crowlyk was small and fortyish, with a long and elegant face, bright eyes, and slightly unruly brown hair tied back in a bunch.

“Hello,” she said. “You're the money person, aren't you?”

“I'm the money person.”

She squeezed his hand perfunctorily and let it drop.

“Eddie? Ed?”

“Edward is fine.”

“Follow me, please.”

The corridor down which she led him was dimly lit, and in a couple of places Edward noticed large dusty outlines where it looked like pictures had hung and been recently removed. Laura Crowlyk was almost a foot shorter than he was, and her light Empire-waist dress billowed out behind her as she walked.

A door on their right was ajar, and she led him through it into a sparsely furnished study. It was dominated by a cavernous fireplace guarded by two large red leather wingback chairs arranged at cozy angles to one another.

“Please sit,” she said. “Would you like some tea? Water? A glass of wine?”

Edward shook his head. He never ate or drank in front of clients if he could help it.

They sat down. The fireplace was swept meticulously clean, although past fires had left behind a blackened patch on the stone. A bundle of dusty birch sticks stood on the hearth in a wrought-iron cradle, still covered in plastic wrap.

When she was settled in opposite him, Laura Crowlyk spoke.

“I suppose Dan told you something about what you'll be doing for us?”

“Actually, he was a little mysterious about it,” Edward said. “I hope it's nothing too shocking.” His little joke.

“Not unless you're very easily shocked. You'll be available for the next two weeks, more or less?”

“More or less. I hope he told you, I'm moving to London on the twenty-third. I still have some arrangements to make.”

“Of course. Congratulations on your appointment, by the way. I understand it's considered quite prestigious.” She left open the question of whether or not she herself considered it prestigious. “How long have you been with Esslin & Hart?”

“Four years.” Edward sat forward in his armchair. Time to dispense with the job-interview chat. “Why don't you tell me how I can help you.”

“In a moment,” said Laura, unreadably. “You're originally from—?”

Edward sighed.

“Well, I grew up in Bangor. Maine, that is. I know there's one in England, too.”

“Yes, I think I would have detected a Welsh accent. Your parents?”

“My father passed away recently. I haven't seen my mother in years.”

“Oh.” At least she seemed slightly abashed at that. “And you took your undergraduate degree at Yale. In English?”

“That's right.”

“How unusual. Did you have a particular area of specialty?”

“Well, the twentieth century, broadly speaking. The modern novel. Henry James. Some poetry, too, I guess. It's been a while.”

Being interrogated as to one's qualifications was an occupational hazard when dealing with the very rich, but he hadn't expected this particular line of questioning. His English degree was one of those shameful secrets he avoided mentioning, roughly on a par with having gone to a public high school and having once tried Ecstasy.

“And now you're in private banking.”

“That's right.”

“Right. Right.” She drew the word out in her upper-class English accent, nodding her long, shapely head.

“Well,” she said, relenting, “let me tell you a little bit about what we have in store for you. Upstairs in this apartment there is a library. It was brought over here by my employers, the Wents, about sixty years ago for safekeeping, shortly before the Second World War. There was a great deal of hysteria, you understand, everyone thought England would be overrun by the Huns at any moment. I don't remember it, of course—I'm not
that
old—but at the time there was some wild talk of selling up and moving the entire family across to America. Thankfully that plan never came to fruition. But the library came over, and somehow it never went back. It had been in the Went family for quite a long time, since the sixteenth century at least. Not unusual in the grand old families, but they were terribly proud of it. Excuse me, it's rather stuffy in here—would you mind opening that window for me, please?”

Edward stood and went over to the window. It was an old wooden window frame, and he expected it to stick, but when he opened the latch it floated up almost by itself, lifted by hidden counterweights. A breeze moved through the room, and the sound of honking horns drifted up from the intersection below.

“The books were brought over in crates,” she went on. “Probably would have been safer back in England, all things considered, but never mind that. Once they arrived here this apartment was procured—purchased from a professional baseball player, I believe—and the library was sent here. But then the war ended, and what with one thing and another the crates were never unpacked, or even opened, as far as I know. They've been upstairs ever since.

“Anyhow, that's how things stand. It's scandalous, really, but I think the Wents just lost interest in them. For a long time no one even remembered they were here, and then one day a family accountant was trying to balance the books and thought to wonder why we were paying such absurd taxes on this apartment—remind me to ask you about that later—and sure enough, somebody stumbled on the old library again. By now nobody has the slightest idea what's up there, just that it's very, very old and someone needs to take care of it.”

She paused. He waited for her to go on, but she just watched him patiently.

“And the books are...very valuable?” he prompted.

“Valuable? Oh, I wouldn't have the first idea. Not my field, as they say.”

“So you wish to have the value of the real estate they occupy assessed.”

“Not really, no. By the way, did you do any medieval work in college?”

“No, I didn't, but—”

There was a limit to how much storytelling Edward allowed his clients as a matter of professional principle, and Laura Crowlyk was now over her quota.

“Ms. Crowlyk, I hope you won't take this the wrong way, but why am I here? If you've come across some historical documents that need evaluating, the firm can certainly put you in touch with a specialist who handles that kind of thing. But I don't really—”

“Oh, no, there's no need for anything like that!” She seemed to find the suggestion slightly hilarious. “I was just getting to that. All we really need is for somebody to get it all unpacked and onto the shelves. Just to break those crates open, for one thing, and start putting it all in some kind of order. Organizing things, getting them cataloged. Sounds hideously boring, I know.”

“Oh, no,” Edward lied. “Not at all.”

He sighed. Either this woman was slightly insane, in some megalomaniacal English way, or a serious miscommunication had occurred. Someone somewhere along the line had Fucked Up. He was a senior analyst with Esslin & Hart, and she was apparently looking for some kind of glorified intern to do her housecleaning for her. Either way he, Edward, was going to have to clear things up, rapidly and if possible without provoking an international incident. He had a reasonable idea of the size of the accounts she represented, and offending her was not an option.

“I think there's been a slight misunderstanding,” he purred. “Do you mind if I make a phone call?”

Edward extracted his cell phone from his jacket pocket and flipped it open. No signal. He looked around.

“Is there a phone here I can use?”

She nodded and stood up, giving him an unexpected flash of freckled cleavage as she leaned forward.

“Follow me.”

He had to take an extra step to catch up with her as she strode out the door. They turned right down the corridor, heading deeper into the apartment. An intricately woven and apparently endless maroon runner followed them underfoot. Edward frowned behind Laura's back as he caught glimpses of more doorways and hallways and rooms. Even he, a frequent visitor to the abodes of the moneyed, was impressed by the apartment's sheer size.

Laura stopped at a doorway. It was half the width of an ordinary door, with a miniature glass knob—it looked like the door to a broom closet, or the entrance to some secret fairy hideaway. She opened it to reveal a narrow, musty alcove, unlit and paneled in dark wood. The floor was littered with old paint chips and hanks of gray dust. It contained a narrow cast-iron spiral staircase leading up.

He balked.

“I'm sorry,” he said, “is this the way to your phone?”

She didn't answer, just started up ahead of him. It was dark, and the stairs were extremely steep, and he snagged his foot on the lip of one of them and had to catch himself on the delicate helical railing. The metal rang faintly under their footsteps. The staircase wound around in a tight spiral, and after two revolutions up into the darkness he couldn't see a thing. When she stopped he nearly walked into her. Standing behind her, he smelled the coconut smell of her shampoo and heard the jingle of keys and the clicking of heavy bolts and latches.

She braced her thin shoulders and pulled, but the door resisted, as if somebody were pulling back from the inside, somebody who adamantly did not want to be disturbed. She struggled for a few seconds, then gave up.

“I'm sorry, I can't do it,” she said, panting a little. “Please open it for me.”

She stepped to one side and flattened herself against the wall, and they gingerly changed places on the tiny metal landing. The keys were still in the metal doorknob. He grasped them, wondering whether this was an elaborate prank, gave them a quarter turn and pulled, putting his back into it, then spread his feet wider apart and pulled again. Behind him he heard Laura take a step down to get out of his way. The door was surprisingly thick, like the entrance to an air raid shelter, and there was a cracking, tearing sound as it started to move, like a tree falling, roots snapping deep under the earth, then a sigh of relief as air began to flow through from behind him. The wind crescendoed as it swung open, then died away again as the air pressures equalized.

It was pitch black on the other side. He tapped gingerly at the floor with the toe of his shoe, but he could see nothing. The sound echoed. There were some glimmers of light, high up and indistinct, but that was all.

What the fuck is this?
he thought. Laura stepped past him, putting a hand on his elbow in an unexpectedly familiar gesture. He waited for his eyes to adjust to the darkness.

“It'll just be a moment,” she said.

The hollow sound of her footsteps receded in the darkness. The air was refreshingly cool, even cold, fifteen or twenty degrees cooler than it had been downstairs. There was a strong, damp, almost sweet smell; he recognized it from somewhere as the odor of quietly decomposing leather. It felt like he'd wandered into a church. Suddenly he was far away from the sun-baked Manhattan outside. He took a deep breath, his lungs expanding with the chilly air. Edward walked forward a few steps, blindly, toward where he guessed Laura was standing.