The Codex

57

Professor Julian Clyve propped up his feet and creaked back in his old chair with his hands behind his head. It was a blustery May day, the wind twisting and torturing the leaves of the sycamore tree outside his window. Sally had been gone now for over a month. There had been no word. He hadn’t expected to hear anything, but Clyve still found the long silence perturbing. When Sally left, they both expected the Codex would usher in one more academic triumph in Professor Clyve’s life. But after thinking about it for a week or two, Clyve had changed his mind. Here he was a Rhodes scholar, a full professorship at Yale, with a string of prizes, academic honors, and publications that most professors didn’t accumulate in a lifetime. The fact was, he hardly needed another academic honor. What he needed — let’s face it — was money. The values of American society were all wrong. The real prize — financial wealth — did not come to those who deserved it most, to the intellectual movers and shakers: the brain trust that controlled, directed, and disciplined the great stupid lumbering beast that was the vulgus mobile. Who did make the money? Sports figures, rock stars, actors, and CEOs. Here he was, at the top of his profession, earning less than the average plumber. It was galling. It was unfair.

Wherever he went, people sought him out, crushed his hand, praised him, admired him. All the wealthy people of New Haven wanted to know him, to have him to dinner, to collect him and show him off as evidence of their good taste, as if he were an Old Master painting or piece of antique silver. Not only was it disgusting, but it was humiliating and expensive. Almost everyone he knew had more money than he did. No matter what honors he gained, no matter what prizes he won or monographs he published, he still wasn’t able to pick up the tab at a reasonably good restaurant in New Haven. Instead they picked up the tab. They had him to their houses. They invited him to the black-tie charity dinners and paid for the table, brushing off his insincere offers of reimbursement. And when it was all over he had to slink back to his two-bedroom, revoltingly bourgeois split-level in the academic ghetto, while they went home to their mansions in the Heights.

Now, finally, he had the means to do something about it. He glanced at the calendar. It was the thirty-first of May. Tomorrow the first installment of the two million from the giant Swiss drug company, Hartz, was to arrive. The coded e-mail confirmation should be coming from the Cayman Islands soon. He would have to spend the money outside the United States, of course. A snug villa on the Costiera Amalfitana would be a nice place to park it; a million for the villa and the second million for expenses. Ravello was supposed to be nice. He and Sally could take their honeymoon there.

He thought back to his meeting with the CEO and the Hartz board, so very serious, so very Swiss. They were skeptical, of course, but when they saw the page Julian had already translated, their old gray mouths were almost watering. The Codex would bring them many billions. Most drug companies had research departments that evaluated indigenous medicines — but here was the ultimate medical cookbook, all nicely packaged, and Julian was about the only person in the world, apart from Sally, who could translate it accurately. Hartz would have to strike a deal with the Broadbents over it, but as the largest pharmaceutical company in the world it was in the best position to pay. And without his translation skills, what use would the Codex be to the Broadbents anyway? Everything would be done correctly: The company had of course insisted on it. The Swiss were like that.

He wondered how Sally would react when she learned that the Codex was going to disappear into the maw of some giant multinational corporation. Knowing her, she would not take it well. But once they started enjoying the two million dollars Hartz had agreed to pay him as a finder’s fee — not to mention the generous remuneration he expected to receive for doing the translation — she’d get over it. And he would show her that this was the right thing to do, that Hartz was in the best position to develop these new drugs and bring them to market. It was the right thing to do. It took money to develop new drugs. Nobody was going to do it for free. Profit made the world go round.

As for himself, poverty had been fine for a few years while he was young and idealistic, but it would become unendurable over thirty. And Professor Julian Clyve was fast approaching thirty.