Syracuse Codex

Jim Nisbet

Description

In The Syracuse Codex, Nisbet returns in a wild tale of skullduggery, mayhem, and history peopled with a rogue's gallery of the eccentric and unscrupulous.San Francisco frame maker Danny Kestrel regularly rubs elbows with the rich and immoral at art openings and commissions. But he's never dreamt of entering their lurid world until Renee Knowles-interior decorator, billionaire's wife, nymphomaniac-asks for a ride.When Knowles is murdered soon after their one-night stand, Danny finds himself a prime suspect. Renee's death has stirred up a hornet's nest of fabulously crooked and wealthy collectors of black market historical artifacts, all seeking the crown jewel: the eponymous Syracuse Codex, a secret account of Empress Theodora's illegitimate son. Worse, everyone seems to think Danny has it.

Informations

• Publié par: ABRAMS BOOKS
• Date de parution: 18 octobre 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781468311990
• Langue: English

Extrait

ALSO BY J IM N ISBET
—N OVELS —
The Damned Don’t Die
( AKA T HE G OURMET )
The Spider’s Cage
( AKA U LYSSES ’ D OG )
Lethal Injection
Death Puppet
The Octopus On My Head
The Price of the Ticket
Prelude To A Scream
The Syracuse Codex
Dark Companion
Windward Passage
A Moment of Doubt
Old and Cold
Snitch World
—P OETRY —
Poems for a Lady
Gnachos for Bishop Berkeley
Morpho
(with Alastair Johnston)
Small Apt
(with photos by Shelly Vogel)
Across the Tasman Sea
Sonnets
—N ONFICTION —
Laminating the Conic Frustum
—R ECORDINGS —
The Visitor
For more information, as well as MP3s of “The Visitor” and “The Golden Gate Bridge,” visit
NoirConeVille.com

This edition first published in the United States in 2016 by The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.
141 Wooster Street
New York, NY 10012
www.overlookpress.com
For bulk and special sales, please contact [e-mail] , or write us at the above address.
Copyright © 2004 by Jim Nisbet
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.
Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress
Manufactured in the United States of America
ISBN: 978-1-59020-201-2
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
In memory of Michel Lebrun
“But what an agonising truth was now contained in those lines of Alfred de Vigny’s Journal d’un Poète which he had previously read without emotion: ‘When one feels oneself smitten by love for a woman, one should say to oneself, Who are the people around her? What kind of life has she led? All one’s future happiness lies in the answer.’”
– Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way .
“One is shy asking men under sentence what they have been sentenced for; and in the same way it is awkward to ask very rich people what they want so much worry for, why they make such a poor use of their wealth, why they don’t give it up, even when they see in it their unhappiness; and if they begin a conversation about it themselves, it is usually embarrassing, awkward, and long.”
– Anton Chekhov, A Doctor’s Visit
“I got some place I gotta be, but I don’t know where it is.”
– John Borland (1946–1994)
Heartiest thanks to Jean-Pierre Deloux, whose hospitality and intelligence nurtured the fortitude by which this book was begun; to Emmanuelle Lavoix: formidable ; to David Koepcke, for being himself; to Tom Goldwasser, Sydna Jones and Bruce Richman for timely expertise; to the editors of Pangolin Papers, Gaté , and Polar , wherein excerpts of the present work first appeared; and to Carol, for a thousand felicities.
• • •
For much of the historicity battered within the present work, its author plundered a number of books. He hastens to assure these respective authors, as well as their readers, that nothing contained in the present tale intends disrespect of the quality or integrity of diverse scholarly endeavors.
Anthony Bridge, Theodora, Portrait in a Byzantine Landscape Robert Browning, Justinian and Theodora Charles Diehl, Theodora, Empress of Byzantium Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Robert Graves, Count Belisarius Harold Lamb, Theodora and the Emperor Procopius, Secret History , translated by Richard Atwater Procopius, The Secret History , translated by G.A. Williamson
In addition, acknowledgement is here made to Mr. Bernard Knox’s extremely informative introduction to Robert Fagles’ translation of Homer’s Odyssey , pp. 3–67.

Contents
An Encounter
One
Two
Three
The Bereaved
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Acquaintance Renewed
Nine
Ten
Frame Boy
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Death of a Prince
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Four or Five other Dead People
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
The Bottomfeeders
Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Nine
Thirty
Chum
Thirty-One
Thirty-Two
Thirty-Three
Thirty-Four
Thirty-Five
Thirty-Six
Crooks, Brine, & Drinker
Thirty-Seven
Thirty-Eight
Thirty-Nine
Forty
Forty-One
Forty-Two
Forty-Three
Byzantine Legacy
Forty-Four
AN ENCOUNTER
One
T HE FIRST TIME I SAW R ENÉE K NOWLES SHE WAS FALLING OUT of her dress. A yard of black fabric, its spaghettini–though it would be more Zeitgeist -accurate to say yuppie squid-ink linguine–straps kept slipping off one or another of her shoulders. She would then run the edge of a self-conscious fingernail under the strap to realign it, up and over her bare shoulder, much as one would deal with a thrown fan-belt. The shoulders were tanned and articulated, as were the upper arms, and along the forearms a fine brunette down swept, like cloud-shadowed windrows of rain-laid grain, if I do say so. Like such grain, her skin had taken the sun well. Still it would have remained tawny and soft–she’d rarely burn or desiccate, there was some genetic protection there; so that her belly, lanuginous also, as one might speculate, would tan to a burnt chocolate, and the sun would evolve the belly, if closely watched, like a darkening Mandlebrot landscape.
Her falling out of the dress had nothing to do with the willfulness of the straps. It had to do with the woman’s advanced drunkenness. Lipstick smeared and knees wobbling, she yet remained attractive. Pretty like a woman who’s taken care of herself–or over whom care has been taken, judging by the rock on her wedding finger–but a kind of pretty not often granted. One could discern, for example, none of the care that children can bring to a complexion, nor little of the hardness that lack of them can. Children had not shown her, as is said, more about herself than she had ever wanted to know. She had learned it some other way. There was a sadness in her eyes that made for a temporal suspension, a disjunction, a gulf to be broached when traveling to the world beyond that unlined face.
Informed or not, it was troublesome for her to stay in the dress, though the dress wasn’t much to start with. She’d been modestly shaping its contents at the gym. The dress displayed the results as intended. A lot of men at the party were watching her, or trying not to watch her, or shying away from her, or failing to shy away from her, much as filings waver uncertainly at the approach of the magnet.
There was another obvious reason for this frank interest. Two of the dozen or so paintings displayed on the walls around us were sumptuous portraits of her, quite naked. By sumptuous I mean to say that not only were they approximately 40 by 60 inches–good-sized paintings–exquisitely rendered, but every stroke was such that one could positively feel the sable as it drew the pigment over her limbs. And they were beautifully framed, not strictly because I myself had framed them, but because the purchaser had not stinted the quality of this final touch. That’s what I did in those days; I framed pictures. Some of them were expensive pictures. These two portraits, for example, had gone for seventy-five thousand dollars apiece. Each frame had cost five thousand. Hand-carved, slightly distressed, patinaed by a secret gilding process, altogether quattrocento … that’s quite enough of that bullshit. In framing them I’d become curious as to their lush subject. And here she was.
I’d been paying my compliments to John Plenty, the artist whose vernissage this was, when she asserted herself. There were quite a few people around John of course. Patrons, owners of work lent to the show, friends, a dealer or two.
“John,” was all she said, as she burst into the circle of people around him, interrupting various inane remarks. Himself drunk in his lordly way, he stared at her. If one might have guessed that his eyes had once twinkled, now they only gleamed; two storm lanterns aloft over the raft of his intelligence, adrift in a sea of alcohol.
I’d known Plenty for some years. Despite the strata of society he’d become accustomed to inhabiting and the large prices his work now commanded, along with the tuxedos and the box at the opera he’d come by necessity to affect, he was a tough customer. When this woman in her little black dress called his name, he turned automatically toward her, warming, it was obvious, at the sound of her voice. But their eyes met and something went wrong. Draping an ursine forearm over her slight shoulders, he drew her awkwardly aside. They exchanged a few words before she broke away. John watched her go, his expression a curious mix of desire and resignation.
Girly Renquist, who owned the gallery, sailed in, deploying her considerable girth between her artist and his distraction. A professional moment. With a backward glance Plenty allowed himself to be carried off to meet a Mr. Kahane from Beverly Hills, who was “in the market.”
The knot of people dispersed. The woman in the black dress defaulted to me.
I was curious.
“Come,” she said abruptly. She put her arm through mine and drew us to a floor-to-ceiling window. “Look at this view,” she declared. “Wouldn’t you like to jump right into it?” The edge to her voice turned the question into a dare, and suffused it with an element of truth.
Undeniably it was a buena vista. If the twin towers of the Golden Gate Bridge had a length of inner tube to go with them, you might have slingshot the sun right back to New York. As it was the sun depended in the tremulous atmosphere beyond them, a five ball dipped in glycerine and visibly descending, the light thickening as its tangent to the global caustic angled magisterially through what cinematographers call the magic hour. Its penultimate rays, spangling around us, c