Codex: A Gripping Intellectual Mystery of Medieval Treasures and Gaming Obsession - Softcover

LEV GROSSMAN is Time magazine's book critic. He has written articles for the New York Times, Salon, Entertainment Weekly, Time Out New York, and the Village Voice. He lives in Brooklyn.

A National Bestseller

"A genuine treat with its sneaky plot and richly textured storytelling." -San Francisco Chronicle

Edward Wozny, a hotshot young banker, is about to leave for vacation when he is sent to help an important yet mysterious client. His task: search the family library for a precious, centuries-old codex that may not even exist. Enlisting the expertise of medievalist Margaret Napier, Edward is determined to solve the mystery of the codex and to decipher the parallels between the codex legend and a computer game that absorbs him in the dark hours of the night.
Weaving the medieval and the modern aspects of its plot in a chilling twist, Codex is a thriller of the highest order.

"Takes its place on the shelf of self-referential, bibliophilic page turners like The Name of the Rose, Possession and A Case of Curiosities, and it's as entertaining as any of them."--The New York Times Book Review

"This puzzle of 'nested secrets within secrets' is tailor-made for fans of The Name of the Rose and The Club Dumas." --Detroit Free-Press


[Author photo]
LEV GROSSMAN is Time magazine's book critic. He has written for the New York Times, Salon, Entertainment Weekly, and Time Out New York. He lives in Brooklyn.

EDWARD WOZNY STOOD squinting at the sun as crowds of people excused themselves past him in both directions. It was hot and bright. He was wearing a very expensive gray handmade suit, and he had to check what seemed like dozens of inside and outside pockets of various sizes and shapes before he found the scrap of paper he was looking for.

He turned it over. It was roughly triangular, with one clean right angle and one ragged edge, the corner of a piece of copier paper rescued from the recycling bin at his office. On one side was a fragment of a xeroxed memo beginning "...insofar as all holders of any equity funds..." On the other side was a name and an address written in blue ballpoint pen. He folded it neatly in half and put it back in the tiny inside pocket-within-a-pocket where he found it.

Edward checked his watch and set off up Madison Avenue, stepping over a NO STANDING sign that had been wrenched out of the concrete and lay across the sidewalk. In front of the corner bodega a man was spraying down trays of cabbage and lettuce and Swiss chard with a hose, filling the air with a ripe, wet, vegetable smell. A branching delta of glittering rivulets ran down toward the gutter. He stepped fastidiously between them and turned the corner onto Eighty-fourth Street.

He felt good-or at least, he was doing his best to feel good. Edward was on vacation, his first time off since he'd started work four years ago, and he'd forgotten what it was like. He was free to go wherever he wanted, whenever he wanted, and could do whatever he wanted when he got there. He thought he would enjoy it, but he felt unsettled, disoriented. He didn't know what to do with himself, with this blank, unscripted, in-between time. Yesterday he'd been a hard-charging, highly paid investment banker in New York, and two weeks from now he'd be a hard-charging, highly paid investment banker in London. For now he was just Edward Wozny, and he wasn't totally sure who that was. Working was all he did, and it was all he could remember doing. What did people do when they weren't working? Play? What were the rules? What did you get if you won?

He sighed and squared his shoulders. It was a quiet block, lined on both sides with expensive limestone townhouses. One of the facades was completely overgrown with a single fantastic vine as thick as a tree and twisted like a rope. A crew of overalled workmen was wrestling a white upright piano down a flight of steps into a basement apartment.

Watching them struggle with it, Edward almost stumbled over a woman who was crouched down on the pavement.

"You know, if you're going to use that word with me," she said crisply, "you'd better be sure you mean it."

The woman was squatting down on her haunches, her dress stretched taut between her thighs, one hand on the pavement for balance like a sprinter ready to burst out of the starting blocks. Her face was hidden from him by the wide brim of a cream sun hat. A few yards behind her stood a white-haired man with a narrow face like a knife-her husband? her father?-waiting next to a cart piled with trunks and suitcases. His hands were clasped lightly behind his back.

"Don't be such a child," he replied.

"Oh, I'm a child now? Is that what I am?" she asked excitedly. Her accent was somewhere between English and Scottish.

"Yes, that's exactly what you are."

The woman looked up at Edward. She was older than he was, maybe thirty-five or forty, with pale skin and dark wavy hair-beautiful in a way that was long out of fashion, like a girl in a silent movie. He could see the pale tops of her breasts in their lacy white cups. Edward hated this kind of public display-it was like rounding a corner and stumbling directly into somebody's bedroom-and he tried to slide past her, but she made eye contact before he could make his escape.

"And what about you? Are you just going to stand there looking down my dress, or are you going to help me look for my earring?"

He stopped. For a critical moment a simple, diplomatic response eluded him. Almost anything would have sufficed-a graceful demurral, a half-decent witticism, a lofty silence-but he blanked.

"Sure," he muttered. Slowly, awkwardly, he crouched down next to her. The woman picked up the exchange with her companion-her husband, Edward decided-as if nothing had interrupted them.

"Well, I'd rather be a child," she said, "than an old man with a red face!"

Edward frowned, studying the glittering cement sidewalk and pretending to have suddenly gone profoundly deaf. He had somewhere to be and his own business to mind.

But he couldn't help noticing that the couple was impeccably dressed. He had a professional knack for estimating incomes, and he smelled money here. The man wore a perfectly tailored light flannel summer suit, the woman a fitted cream sundress that matched her hat. He was thin and a little ravaged-looking, with a thick shock of white hair; his complexion actually was a little florid, as if he'd just gotten back from a spell in the tropics. The luggage piled up on the cart was extravagant, made of deep green leather with a rough, pebbly texture, and it included pieces of every imaginable shape and size, from tiny cubical vanity cases to giant steamer trunks studded with gleaming metal clasps to a circular hatbox the size of a bass drum. It was old-fashioned, either vintage or a meticulous re-creation thereof-it had the glamorous air of an early twentieth-century transatlantic ocean liner, the kind featured in old newsreels being christened with bottles of champagne amid silent storms of confetti.

A sedan with tinted windows idled by the curb. On each piece of luggage was a label with a single word, in small or large letters: WEYMARSHE.

Edward decided to break his silence.

"So what did it look like?" he asked. "The earring, I mean?"

The woman looked at him as if a passing shih tzu had suddenly spoken.

"Silver. The backing must have fallen off." She paused, then added unhelpfully: "It's a Yardsdale."

The older man got tired of waiting and knelt down too, pausing first to tug up the legs of his trousers with the air of somebody being dragged into something that was infinitely beneath his dignity. Soon they were joined by the driver, a sallow man with a weak chin-a virtual straight line from his lower lip to his collar-who looked cautiously under the limousine. The doorman finished loading the luggage into the trunk. Edward sensed that they shared the older man's dislike of the woman in the sun hat. They were allied against her.

Something crunched under Edward's right heel. He drew back his foot to reveal the crushed remains of the earring. Judging from its surviving twin it must have been shaped like a delicate silver hourglass, but now it was a scrap of mashed tinsel indistinguishable from a gum wrapper.

Serves her right for dragging him into this, he thought. He stood up.

"Sorry," he said, without making any special effort to sound apologetic. "I didn't see it."

Edward held out his hand. The woman stood up too, her face flushed from squatting for so long. He expected an explosion, but instead she looked like she'd just gotten exactly what she wanted for Christmas. She flashed him a heartbreaking smile and plucked the earring delightedly from his hand. As she did so he noticed something he'd missed before: a drop of blood, swollen and fully formed, dangling tremulously from her delicate earlobe. Another spot of blood was visible on the shoulder of her dress right below it.

"Look, Peter! He utterly demolished it!" She turned gaily to her husband, who was brushing invisible dirt from his sleeves. "Well, you could at least try to feign some interest."

He peered at the contents of her palm.

"Yes, very nice."

Just like that, they were back to keeping up...