The Codex Page 4

  He paused, clasped his hands, and leaned forward.

  You’re going to earn this money. I’ve arranged to bury myself and my collection in a tomb somewhere in the world. I challenge you to find me. If you do, you can rob my tomb and have it all. That’s my challenge to you, my three sons.

  He inhaled, tried to smile.

  I warn you: It’s going to be difficult and dangerous. Nothing in life worth doing is easy. And here’s the kicker: You’ll never succeed unless you cooperate.

  He brought his massive fist down on the desk.

  That’s it in a nutshell. I didn’t do much for you in life, but by God I’m going to fix that with my death.

  He got up again and walked over to the camera. His arm reached out to turn it off, and then, as an afterthought, he paused, his blurry face looming gigantically on the screen:

  I’ve never been much on sentiment, so I’ll just say to you, good-bye. Good-bye, Philip, Vernon, and Tom. Good-bye and good luck. I love you.

  The screen went dead.

  5

  Tom remained on the sofa, momentarily unable to move. Hutch Barnaby was the first to react. He rose and coughed delicately by way of breaking the shocked silence.

  “Fenton? Seems we’re not needed here any longer.”

  Fenton nodded, rising awkwardly, actually blushing.

  Barnaby turned to the brothers and politely touched the brim of his cap. “As you can see, this isn’t a police matter. We’ll leave you to, ah, sort things out on your own.” They began edging toward the door archway that led to the hall. They couldn’t wait to get away.

  Philip rose. “Officer Barnaby?” His voice was half choked.

  “Yes?”

  “I trust you won’t mention this to anybody. It wouldn’t be helpful If ... if the whole world started looking for the tomb.”

  “Good point. No reason to mention it to anyone. No reason at all. I’ll call off the SOC boys.” He backed out, and disappeared. A moment later they could hear the sound of the great front door of the house clanking shut.

  The three brothers remained.

  “The son of a bitch,” Philip said quietly. “I can’t believe it. The son of a bitch.”

  Tom glanced at his brother’s white face. He knew that he’d been living rather well on his assistant professor’s salary. He needed the money. And no doubt he had already been spending it.

  Vernon said, “What now?”

  The word hung in the silence.

  “I can’t believe the old bastard,” Philip said. “Taking a dozen old master paintings to the grave like that, not to mention all that priceless Mayan jade and gold. I’m floored.” He slipped a silk handkerchief out of his vest pocket and dabbed his brow. “He had no right.”

  “So what do we do?” Vernon repeated.

  Philip stared at him. “We go find the tomb, of course.”

  “How?”

  “A man can’t bury himself with half a billion dollars of art without help. We find out who helped him.”

  “I don’t believe it,” Tom said. “He never trusted anybody in his life.”

  “He couldn’t have done it on his own.” . :

  “It’s so ... him,” said Philip suddenly.

  “Maybe he left clues.” Vernon strode over to the breakfront drawers, jerked one open, and rummaged through it, swearing. He pulled out a second, and a third, becoming so agitated that the drawer came out all the way, spilling its contents to the floor—playing cards, Parcheesi, chess, Chinese checkers. Tom remembered them all—the old games of their childhood, now yellowed and shabby with age. He felt a cold knot in his chest; this is what it had come to. Vernon cursed and gave the scattered mess a kick, sending pieces all over the room.

  “Vernon, trashing the house is pointless.”

  Vernon, ignoring him, kept opening drawers, sweeping their contents onto the floor, moving on.

  Philip slipped his pipe out of his trouser pocket and lit it with a shaking hand. “You’re wasting your time. I say we go talk to Marcus Hauser. He’s the key.”

  Vernon paused. “Hauser? Father hasn’t been in contact with him in forty years.”

  “He’s the only one who really knew Father. They spent two years together in Central America. If anyone knows where Father went, it’s him.”

  “Father hates Hauser.”

  “I expect they had a reconciliation, with Father sick and all.” Philip flicked open a gold lighter and sucked the flame into the bowl of his pipe with a gurgle.

  Vernon moved into the den. Tom could hear cupboards being opened and shut, books being pulled from shelves, things crashing to the floor.

  “I’m telling you, Hauser’s involved. We’ve got to move fast. I’ve got debts—I’ve got obligations.”

  Vernon came back from the den carrying a boxful of papers, which he slammed down on the coffee table. “It figures you’d already be spending your inheritance.”

  Philip turned to him coolly. “Who was it took twenty grand from Father just last year?”

  “That was a loan.” Vernon started shuffling through the papers, rifling folders, scattering them on the floor. Tom saw their old elementary school report cards spilling from a file. It surprised him that their father had bothered to save those—particularly when he had been none too pleased with their grades to begin with.

  “Have you paid it back yet?” Philip asked.

  “I will.”

  “Of course you will,” said Philip sarcastically.

  Vernon colored. “What about the forty thousand that Father spent on sending you to graduate school? Have you paid that back yet?”

  “That was a gift. He paid for Tom’s veterinary school, too—right, Tom? And if you had gone to graduate school he would have paid for yours. Instead, you went and lived with that swami woo-woo in India.”

  There was a tense silence.

  “Go to hell,” said Vernon.

  Tom stared from one brother to the other. It was happening, just as it had happened a thousand times before. Usually he stepped in and tried to be peacemaker. Just as often it did no good.

  “The hell with you, too,” Philip said. He put the pipe back between his teeth with a click and turned on his heel.

  “Wait!” Vernon called, but it was too late. When Philip got mad, he left, and he was doing it again. The great door boomed shut with a dying rattle.

  “For God’s sake, Vernon, can’t you pick a better time to fight?”

  “Screw him. He started it, didn’t he?”

  Tom couldn’t even remember who started it.

  Back in the office, Hutch Barnaby sat in his chair, a fresh cup of coffee resting on his paunch, looking out the window. Fenton sat in the other chair, with his own cup, staring gloomily at the floor.

  “Fenton, you gotta stop thinking about it. These things happen.”

  “I can’t believe it.”

  “I know, it’s some crazy shit, the guy burying himself with half a billion dollars. Don’t worry. Someday someone in this town’ll commit a New York Times front-page crime, and your name’ll be there. This just didn’t pan out.”

  Fenton nursed his coffee—and his disappointment.

  “I knew it, Fenton, even before I saw that video. I figured it out. When I realized it wasn’t an insurance scam, it was like a lightbulb went on in my head. Hey, it would make a great movie, don’t you think? Rich guy takes his shit with him.”

  Fenton said nothing.

  “How do you think the old guy did it? Think about it. He needed help. That was a lot of stuff. You can’t move a few tons of artwork around the world without someone noticing.”

  Fenton sipped.

  Barnaby glanced up at the clock and then down at the papers strewn about his desk. “Two hours to lunch. How come nothing interesting ever happens in this city? Look at this. Drugs and more drugs. Why don’t these kids rob a bank for a change?”

  Fenton drained the cup. “It’s out there.”

  Silence.

  “What are
you trying to say? What do you mean by that comment? It’s out there. So what? Lot of things are out there.”

  Fenton crushed the cup.

  “You aren’t suggesting something, are you?”

  Fenton dropped the cup in the trash can.

  “You said, It’s out there. I want to know what you meant by that.”

  “We go get it.”

  “And?”

  “We keep it.”

  Barnaby laughed. “Fenton, I’m amazed at you. In case you didn’t notice, we’re law enforcement officers. Did that little fact slip your mind? We’re supposed to be honest.”

  “Yeah,” said Fenton. :.

  “Right,” said Barnaby after a moment. “Honesty. If you don’t have that, Fenton, then what do you have?”

  “Half a billion dollars,” said Fenton.

  6

  The building wasn’t an old brownstone as it would have been in a Bogart film but a glass and steel monstrosity that teetered into the sky above West Fifty-seventh Street, an ugly eighties skyscraper. At least, thought Philip, the rent would be high. And if the rent was high, it meant Marcus Aurelius Hauser was a successful private investigator.

  Strolling into the lobby was like walking into a giant polished granite cube. The place reeked of cleaning fluids. A stand of sickly bamboo grew in one corner. An elevator whisked him up to the thirtieth floor, and he was soon at the cherry doors leading into the offices of Marcus Hauser, PI.

  Philip paused inside the doorway. Whatever he had imagined as the office of a private investigator, this colorless postmodern interior of gray slate, industrial carpeting, and black polished granite was not it. How could anyone work in such a sterile space? The room appeared empty.

  “Yeah?” came a voice from behind a half-moon wall of glass bricks.

  Philip came around and found himself staring at the back of a man sitting at a vast kidney-shaped desk, which instead of facing the door to his office faced in the opposite direction toward a wall of windows that looked west over the dull zinc sheen of the Hudson River. Without turning, the man gestured toward an armchair. Philip crossed the floor, seated himself, and settled in to study Marcus Hauser: ex-Vietnam Green Beret; ex-tomb robber; ex-lieutenant, BATF, Manhattan field office.

  In his father’s photo albums he had seen pictures of Hauser as a young man, blurry and indistinct, dressed in jungle khakis, packing some kind of firearm on his hip. He was always grinning. Philip felt a little disconcerted finally seeing him in the flesh. He looked even smaller than Philip had imagined him, and he was overdressed in a brown suit with collar pin, vest, gold chain, and watch fob. A working-class man aping the gentry. There was the scent of cologne about him, and what little hair he had was excessively pomaded and curled, each strand individually arranged to provide maximal coverage to his bald spot. Gold rings winked on no fewer than four of his fingers. His hands had been manicured, his nails cleaned and polished, his nose carefully trimmed of hair. Even his bald pate, gleaming under the screen of hairs that covered it, gave every appearance of having been waxed and buffed. Philip found himself wondering if this was the same Marcus Hauser who had tramped through the jungles with his father in search of lost cities and ancient tombs. Perhaps there had been some mistake.

  He cleared his throat. “Mr. Hauser?”

  “Marcus,” came the rapid reply, like a cracking good tennis volley. His voice was equally disconcerting: high, nasal, working-class accent. His eyes, however, were as green and cool as a crocodile’s.

  Philip felt flustered. He recrossed his legs and, without asking permission, took out his pipe and began to fill it. At this, Hauser smiled, slid open his desk drawer, turned out a humidor, and removed an enormous Churchill. “So glad you smoke,” he said, rolling the cigar between his perfect fingers, sliding a gold monogrammed clipper out of his pocket, and giving the end a snip. “We mustn’t let the barbarians take over.” When he had lit up, he leaned back in his chair and, looking at him through a skein of smoke, said, “What can I do for the son of my old partner, Maxwell Broadbent?”

  “May we speak in confidentiality?”

  “Naturally.”

  “Six months ago my father was diagnosed with cancer.” Philip paused, observing Hauser’s face to see if he had already known. But Hauser’s face was as opaque as his mahogany desk. “Lung cancer,” Philip continued. “They operated, and he got the usual chemo and radiation. He gave up the stogies and went into remission. For a while it seemed like he had it licked, and then it came roaring back. He started on the chemotherapy again, but he hated it. One day he ripped out the TVs, decked a male nurse, and left. He picked up a box of Cuba Libres on the way home and never went back. They had given him six months to live, and that was three months ago.”

  Hauser listened, puffing on his cigar.

  Philip paused. “Has he been in touch with you?”

  Hauser shook his head, took another puff. “Not for forty years.”

  “Sometime last month,” Philip said, “Maxwell Broadbent disappeared, along with his collection. He left us a video.”

  Hauser raised his eyebrows.

  “It was a last will and testament of sorts. In it, he said he was taking it with him into the grave.”

  “He did what?” Hauser leaned forward, his face suddenly interested. The mask had fallen for a moment: He was genuinely astonished.

  “He took it with him. Everything. Money, artwork, his collection. Just like an Egyptian pharaoh. He buried himself in a tomb somewhere in the world and then issued us a challenge: If we find the tomb, we can rob it. That, you see, is his idea of making us earn our inheritance.”

  Hauser leaned back and laughed long and loud. When he finally recovered, he took a couple of lazy puffs on his cigar, then reached out and tapped a two-inch ash off. “Only Max could come up with a scheme like that.”

  “So you don’t know anything about this?” Philip asked.

  “Nothing.” Hauser seemed to be telling the truth.

  “You’re a private investigator,” said Philip.

  Hauser shifted the cigar from one side of his mouth to the other.

  “You grew up with Max. You spent a year with him in the jungle. You know him and how he worked better than anyone. I wondered if you’d be willing, as a PI, to help me find his tomb.”

  Hauser eased a stream of blue smoke out of his mouth.

  Philip added, “It doesn’t seem to me that this would be a difficult assignment. An art collection like that wouldn’t travel inconspicuously.”

  “It would in the hold of Max’s Gulfstream IV.”

  “I doubt he buried himself in his plane.”

  “The Vikings buried themselves in their ships. Maybe Max packed his treasure in an airtight, pressure-resistant container and ditched his plane in the ocean over the mid-Pacific abyssal plain, where it sank in two miles of water.” He spread his hands and smiled.

  Philip managed to say, “No.” He dabbed his brow, trying to suppress the image of the Lippi, two miles deep, wedged in the abyssal muck. “You don’t really believe that, do you?”

  “I’m not saying that’s what he did. I’m just showing you what ten seconds of thinking can turn up. Are you working with your brothers?”

  “Half-brothers. No. I’ve decided to find this tomb on my own.”

  “What are their plans?”

  “I don’t know and frankly I don’t care. I’ll share what I find with them, of course.”

  “Tell me about them.”

  “Tom’s probably the one to watch out for. He’s the youngest. When we were children, he was the wild one. He’s the kid who would be the first to jump off the cliff into the water, the first to throw the rock at the wasp’s nest. Got kicked out of a couple of schools but cleaned up his act in college and has been on the straight and narrow ever since.”

  “And the other one, Vernon?”

  “Right now he’s in some pseudo-Buddhist cult run by an ex-philosophy professor from Berkeley. He was always the lost one.
He’s tried it all: drugs, cults, gurus, encounter groups. When he was a kid he’d bring home crippled cats, doggies that had been run over by cars, little birdies that had been pushed out of the nest by their bigger siblings—that sort of thing. Everything he brought home died. In school, he was the kid the others loved to pick on. He flunked out of college and hasn’t been able to hold down a steady job. He’s a sweet kid but ... incompetent at adulthood.”

  “What are they doing now?”

  “Tom went home to his ranch in Utah. The last I heard he had given up on searching for the tomb. Vernon says he’s going to find the tomb on his own, doesn’t want me to be part of it.”

  “Anyone else know about this besides your two brothers?”

  “There were two cops in Santa Fe who saw the videotape and know the whole story.”

  “Names?”

  “Barnaby and Fenton.”

  Hauser made a note. A light on the phone blinked once, and Hauser picked up the receiver. He listened for a long time, spoke softly and rapidly, made a call, another, and then another. Philip felt annoyed that Hauser was doing other business in front of him, wasting his time.

  Hauser hung up. “Any wives or girlfriends in the picture?”

  “Five ex-wives: four living, one deceased. No girlfriends to speak of.”

  A faint curl stretched Hauser’s upper lip. “Max was always one with the ladies.”

  Again the silence stretched on. Hauser seemed to be thinking. Then, to Philip’s annoyance, he made another call, speaking in low tones. Finally he set down the phone.

  “Well now, Philip, what do you know about me?”

  “Only that you were my father’s partner in exploration, that you both knocked around Central America for a couple of years. And that you two had a falling-out.”

  “That’s right. We spent almost two years in Central America together, looking for Mayan tombs to excavate. This was back in the early sixties when it was more or less legal. We found a few things, but it was only after I left that Max made his big strike and became rich. I went on to Vietnam.”

  “And the falling-out? Father never talked about it.”