The Codex

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 IVs, 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.”

There was a faint pause. “Max never talked about it?”

“No.”

“I can hardly remember it now. You know how it is when two people are thrown together for a long stretch of time, they get on each other’s nerves.” Hauser laid his cigar down in a cut crystal ashtray. The ashtray was as big as a dinner plate and probably weighed twenty pounds. Philip wondered if he had made a mistake coming here. Hauser seemed like a lightweight.

The phone blinked again, and Hauser picked it up. This was the last straw; Philip rose. “I’ll come back when you’re less busy,” he said curtly.

Hauser wagged a gold-ringed finger at Philip to wait, listened for a minute, and then hung up. “So tell me, Philip: What’s so special about Honduras?”

“Honduras? What’s that got to do with anything?”

“Because that’s where Max went.”

Philip stared at him. “So you were in on it!”

Hauser smiled. “Not at all. That was the substance of the phone call I just received. Almost four weeks ago today his pilot flew him and a planeload of cargo to a city in Honduras called San Pedro Sula. From there he took a military helicopter to a place called Brus Lagoon. And then he vanished.”

“You found all this out just now?”

Hauser generated a new and mighty cloud of smoke. “I’m a PI.”

“And not a bad one, it seems.”

Hauser emitted another meditative cloud. “As soon as I talk to the pilot, I’ll know a lot more. Like what kind of cargo the plane was carrying and how much it weighed. Your father didn’t make any effort to cover his tracks going down to Honduras. Did you know he and I were there together? I’m not surprised that’s where he went. It’s a big country with the most inaccessible interior in the world — thick jungle, uninhabited, mountainous, cut by deep gorges, and sealed off by the Mosquito Coast. That’s where I expect he went — into the interior.”

“It’s plausible.”

Hauser added after a moment: “I’m taking the case.”

Philip felt irritated. He didn’t recall having offered Hauser the job yet. But the guy had already demonstrated his competence, and since he now knew the story, he would probably do. “We haven’t talked about a fee.”

“I’ll need a retainer. I expect the expenses in this case are going to run high. Anytime you do business in a shitcan Third World country you have to pay off every Tomás, Rico, and Orlando.”

“I had in mind a fee based on contingency,” Philip said quickly. “If we recover the collection, you get, say, a small percentage. I also should mention that I plan to divide it with my brothers: That’s only fair.”

“Contingency fees are for car-crash lawyers. I need a cash retainer up front. If I succeed, there will be an additional fixed fee.”

“A retainer? Like how much?”

“Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.”

Philip almost laughed. “What makes you think I’ve got that kind of money?”

“I never think anything, Mr. Broadbent. I know. Sell the Klee.”

Philip felt his heart stop for a moment. “What?”

“Sell the large Paul Klee watercolor you own, Blau Kirk. It’s a beaut. I should be able to get you four hundred for it.”

Philip exploded. “Sell it? Never. My father gave me that painting.”

Hauser shrugged.

“And how did you know about that painting anyway?”

Hauser smiled and opened the soft white palms of his hand, like two calla lilies. “You do want to hire the best, don’t you, Mr. Broadbent?”

“Yes, but this is blackmail.”

“Let me explain how I work.” Hauser leaned forward. “My first loyalty is to the case, not the client. When I take a case, I solve it, regardless of the consequences to the client. I keep the retainer. If I succeed, I get an additional fee.”

“This discussion is irrelevant. I’m not selling the Klee.”

“Sometimes the client loses his nerve and wants to back out. Sometimes bad things happen to good people. I kiss the babies and attend the funerals and keep going until the case is solved.”

“You can’t expect me to sell that painting, Mr. Hauser. It’s the only thing I have of any value from my father. I love that painting.”

Philip found Hauser gazing at him in a way that made him feel odd. The man’s eyes were vacant, his face calm, emotionless. “Think of it this way: The painting is the sacrifice you need to make to recover your inheritance.”

Philip hesitated. “You think we’ll succeed?”

“I do.”

Philip gazed at him. He could always buy the painting back. “All right, I’ll sell the Klee.”

Hauser’s eyes narrowed further. He took another careful puff. Then he removed the cigar from his mouth and spoke.

“If successful, my fee will be one million dollars.” Then he added, “We don’t have much time, Mr. Broadbent. I’ve already booked us tickets to San Pedro Sula, leaving first thing next week.”