Codex Read Online Free PDF Page B

“About my schedule.”
    Maybe I should make a clean break,
he thought.
Call it off. Do it now.
She watched him steadily, as if she could sense his indecision but knew the outcome in advance.
    â€œTomorrow then.”
    The door nudged him impatiently on the shoulder, then closed.
    Â 
    TWENTY-FIVE MINUTES later Edward was back in more familiar territory, sitting in a tattered armchair in his friend Zeph’s apartment. His hand held a sweating bottle of McSorley’s Ale. The room had a pleasantly musty smell. It was dark, partly because the lights were off, but mostly because the windows were covered with big kindergarten sheets of construction paper in primary colors. The only light came from a computer screen.
    Zeph sat next to him playing a computer game. Edward had known him since college, where they’d been assigned to each other as freshman roommates and, improbably, stayed friends. Zeph was always slightly too cool for the computer geeks he took most of his classes with, and Edward hadn’t been quite cool enough for the moneyed, prep-schooled pre-professionals with whom he spent most of his time, and that shared sense of not-quite-fitting-in had become a bond between them in itself. Zeph looked like a child’s idea of an ogre: six and a half feet tall, with the massive, gently rounded frame of a naturally large man who never exercised. He had a big potato nose and lumpy amateur white-boy dreadlocks.
    â€œSo I went to see the Wents today,” Edward said, breaking a long, comfortable silence.
    â€œThe who?” Zeph’s double-bass voice sounded like a record played a little too slowly.
    â€œThe Wents. Those English clients I told you about. It turns out all they wanted was somebody to organize their library.”
    â€œTheir library? What the hell did you tell them?”
    â€œWhat could I tell them? I’m organizing their library.”
    â€œYou are.”
    â€œWell, I made a start on it. It’s a pretty big library.”
    Deep horizontal wrinkles formed in Zeph’s massive brow as he attempted to negotiate some especially tricky maneuver in the game he was playing.
    â€œEdward,” he said gravely, “you have just received the most prestigious appointment of your dull but admittedly lucrative career. You’re the Golden Child. You’re leaving the country in two weeks. Why would you want to spend your last days in the greatest city in the world cleaning some Jeremy Irons character’s attic?”
    â€œI don’t know.” Edward shook his head. “It’s some kind of screwup. I’m going to call it off tomorrow. I’ll call the office and rip somebody’s head off. But it’s weird, they took me up to this old library, and once I actually saw all these old books lying around in boxes, in this enormous old room—I don’t know. I can’t explain it.” Edward sipped his beer. It was true, he really couldn’t explain it. “It was just a courtesy visit. You’re right, I should be on vacation.”
    â€œVenice is a vacation. This is like work-release.”
    â€œI’ll call it off tomorrow. I’m just a little low on sleep. I pulled a couple of all-nighters right before one of those big SEC sessions. Haven’t really bounced back yet.” He yawned. “It was weird—for once it was kind of good to be doing something that didn’t involve any thinking. Nobody watching me. They just left me alone up there. They’re some kind of aristocrats—he’s a duke or a baron or something.” He sat back in his chair and sighed. “Plus it’s good for me to be around English people. I need to learn how to deal with them.”
    â€œWhat’s to learn?” Zeph took a swig from a can of Diet Pepsi. “Bad teeth, sexy accents.”
    Zeph wore sweatpants and a T-shirt with the words GOGO PARA PRESIDENTE on it. While they talked he fiddled with the game, his