The Book of Air and Shadows

by Michael Gruber

  The Book of Air and Shadows

  Michael Gruber

  A distinguished Shakespearean scholar found tortured to death…

  A lost manuscript and its secrets buried for centuries…

  An encrypted map that leads to incalculable wealth…

  The Washington Post called Michael Gruber's previous work "a miracle of intelligent fiction and among the essential novels of recent years." Now comes his most intellectually provocative and compulsively readable novel yet.

  Tap-tapping the keys and out come the words on this little screen, and who will read them I hardly know. I could be dead by the time anyone actually gets to read them, as dead as, say, Tolstoy. Or Shakespeare. Does it matter, when you read, if the person who wrote still lives?

  These are the words of Jake Mishkin, whose seemingly innocent job as an intellectual property lawyer has put him at the center of a deadly conspiracy and a chase to find a priceless treasure involving William Shakespeare. As he awaits a killer-or killers-unknown, Jake writes an account of the events that led to this deadly endgame, a frantic chase that began when a fire in an antiquarian bookstore revealed the hiding place of letters containing a shocking secret, concealed for four hundred years. In a frantic race from New York to England and Switzerland, Jake finds himself matching wits with a shadowy figure who seems to anticipate his every move. What at first seems like a thrilling puzzle waiting to be deciphered soon turns into a dangerous game of cat-and-mouse, where no one-not family, not friends, not lovers-is to be trusted.

  Moving between twenty-first-century America and seventeenth-century England, The Book of Air and Shadows is a modern thriller that brilliantly re-creates William Shakespeare's life at the turn of the seventeenth century and combines an ingenious and intricately layered plot with a devastating portrait of a contemporary man on the brink of self-discovery… or self-destruction.

  Michael Gruber

  The Book of Air and Shadows

  © 2007

  For E.W.N.

  Our Revels now are ended: These our actors (As I foretold you) were all Spirits, and Are melted into Ayre, into thin Ayre, And like the baselesse fabricke of this vision The Clowd-capt Towres, the gorgeous Pallaces, The solemne Temples, the great Globe it selfe, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, And like this insubstantial Pageant faded Leave not a racke behinde: we are such stuffe As dreames are made on; and our little life Is rounded with a sleepe… -WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE,

  The Tempest, act IV, scene i,

  The First Folio, 1623

  1

  Tap-tapping the keys and out come the words on this little screen, and who will read them I hardly know. I could be dead by the time anyone actually sees this, as dead as, say, Tolstoy. Or Shakespeare. Does it matter, when you read, if the person who wrote still lives? It sort of does, I think. If you read something by a living writer, you could, at least in theory, dash off a letter, establish a relationship maybe. I think a lot of readers feel this way. Some readers write to fictional characters as well, which is a little spookier.

  But clearly I am not dead yet, although this could change at any moment, one reason why I’m writing this down. It’s a fact of writing that the writer never knows the fate of the text he’s grinding out, paper being good for so many uses other than displaying words in ordered array, nor are the tiny electromagnetic charges I am creating on this laptop machine immune to the insults of time. Bracegirdle is definitely dead, having succumbed to wounds received at the battle of Edgehill in the English Civil War, sometime in late October of 1642. We think. But dead nevertheless, although before dying he composed the fifty-two-page manuscript that has more or less screwed up my life, or killed me, I don’t know which yet. Or maybe the little professor was more to blame, Andrew Bulstrode, because he dropped the thing in my lap and then got himself murdered, or I could blame Mickey Haas, my old college roomie, who turned Bulstrode on to me. Mickey’s still alive as far as I know, or the girl, the woman I should say, she has to carry some freight for this, because I seriously doubt I would have plunged as I did if I had not spied her long white neck rising from her collar there in the Brooke Russell Astor Reading Room of the New York Public Library, and wanted to kiss it so much it made my jaw hurt.

  And Albert Crosetti and his unusual mom and his even more remarkable girlfriend, Carolyn, if girlfriend she is, all discoverers, and explicators, and decipherers, of Bracegirdle, my nemesis, without whom…

  I don’t forget the actual villains, but I can’t really blame them. Villains are just there, like rust, dull and almost chemical in the stupid simplicity of their greed or pride. Remarkable how easy it is to avoid these, how often we fail to do so. Not to mention Mary, Queen of Scots (speaking of stupid), one more conspiracy added to her score, even if all she did in this case was to exist. Naturally, I blame my dad, the old crook. And why not? I blame him for everything else.

  I see I am not doing this right. Okay, regain focus, at least array the facts, and begin by identifying the writer, me, Jake Mishkin, by profession an intellectual property lawyer. I believe that some gangsters may in the near future attempt to kill me. Although there is a kind of lawyer who can reasonably expect a certain level of physical danger as part of the employment picture, I am not that kind of lawyer-by design, actually. In my youth, I was familiar enough with such lawyers; a few of them, I have reason to believe, actually did get whacked, and so when I chose my field of law I made sure it was one in which the ordinary participants did not routinely pack heat. IP law has its share of violent lunatics (perhaps more than its share), but when they scream obscenities and threaten to kill you and your client, they are, almost all the time, speaking figuratively.

  Even then, much of this venom is directed at litigators, and I am not a litigator. I don’t have the personality for it, being a large peaceful person who believes that nearly all lawsuits, especially those involving intellectual property, are stupid, often grotesquely so, and that the underlying issues in virtually all of them could be solved by reasonable people in twenty minutes of conversation. This is not the mind-set of a successful litigator. Ed Geller, our senior partner, is a litigator: he is a pugnacious, aggressive, flamboyant, obnoxious little man, a being who might have served as the template for any nasty lawyer joke, yet to my certain knowledge, Ed (an individual for whom I have, by the way, the utmost professional respect) has never heard the snap of a bullet fired at him with bad intent, or tussled with thugs bent on robbery, both of which are now part of my life experience.

  I should say that IP law is divided broadly into industrial, which covers trademarks and patents, and probably software fits in this class too, and copyright, which covers all the arts of humanity-music, writing, films, images of all kinds, Mickey Mouse, etc., and I will record here the instinctive punch of the special key on my machine that adds the sacred © to the little rodent’s name, and which I have just gone back and removed, because this is a new me writing this whatever it is. My firm, Geller Linz Grossbart & Mishkin, is a copyright house, and although each of the partners handles the full spectrum of copyright work, you could make a case that each of us has a different specialty. Marty Linz does TV and movies, Shelly Grossbart does music, Ed Geller is, as I said, our litigation chief. And I handle the literary business, which means I spend a good deal of time with writers, enough to realize that I am not and will never be one of their number. Quite a few of my clients have told me, often with a patronizing tone, that within every lawyer is a strangled poet, attributing the quotation to a variety of different authors. I don’t really mind this sort of thing, since all these people are as helpless as kittens in the real, as opposed to the imaginary, universe. I can do cutting irony too, when I choose, which is n
ot that often because, in all honesty, I admire the hell out of them. I mean, just making up a story out of your head and writing it so that someone else, a complete stranger, can read it and understand it and have real feelings about fictitious persons! Were you ever so unfortunate as to have a seat on a packed-tight plane or train where you were stuck in front of a couple of jerks exchanging anecdotes? You want to cut your throat out of sheer boredom, right? Or kill them. My point is, at the risk of repeating myself, it’s damn hard to tell a coherent story. One client of mine told me that in order to write a story you start with everything that ever happened to anyone and carve away the parts that don’t fit. This was a joke, however. Although I seem to be doing something like it now.

  Perhaps, though, I am being too diffident. The legal profession is not without its creative side. We do a lot of writing, nearly all of it of interest only to other lawyers, but still there is the business of telling a story, setting a scene, laying out the facts and assumptions behind one’s case. Young Charles Dickens started out as a court reporter, and scholars believe that this experience formed the sense of the human drama evident in his novels. Besides which, those novels are nearly all about crimes, mainly of the white-collar type. Mickey Haas is my source for that factoid, and he should know, as he is a professor of English literature at Columbia. And he is also the beginning of this story.

  How much do you need to know about Mickey? Well, first of all you know something, because only a certain type of mature man allows himself to be called by a schoolboy diminutive nickname. I don’t believe that “Jake” is a nickname of the same type at all. He is certainly my oldest friend, but he is not entirely a serious person. Perhaps if he were a more serious person he would have shined the little professor on, and this business would not have occurred. Fittingly, therefore, I have ended up at Mickey’s house, a cabin on Lake Henry deep in Adirondack State Park, where I am currently in…I suppose I am hiding out, but I can hardly bring myself to use such a dramatic term. In seclusion, let us say. Armed seclusion, let us say.

  I have known Mickey (or Melville C. Haas, as it appears on the spines of his many books) since my youth, starting from our sophomore year at Columbia, when I answered an ad asking for a roommate to share a fourth-floor walk-up on 113th Street off Amsterdam Avenue. It is typical of Mickey that the ad was posted in the window of a Chinese laundry on Amsterdam rather than at the student union or with the university housing office. When I asked him later why he’d done that, he replied that he wished to solicit roommates from the subpopulation that wore professionally cleaned and ironed shirts. Oddly enough I was not really of that population; I owned a single dress shirt, a white-on-white De Pinna discarded by my father, and had gone into the little shop to have it pressed for a job interview.

  At the time I was living in a greasy single-room-occupancy building, having recently run away from home. I was eighteen and grindingly poor, and the SRO was charging me fifteen bucks a day, kitchen and bath down the hall. Both of these rooms stank, in different but equally unpleasant ways, nor was the stench contained within either. So I was a little desperate, and it was a nice apartment, a two-bedroom with a partial view of the cathedral, and while dark in the manner of such long-hall uptown apartments, it was reasonably clean, and Mickey seemed a decent enough guy. I had seen him on campus before this, for he was a noticeable fellow: big, nearly as big as me, red-haired, with the pendulous lip and the protuberant, hooded blue eyes of one of the lesser Habsburgs. He wore tweed jackets and flannel pants and, in cold weather, an enveloping genuine Royal Navy duffel coat in camel, and he spoke in the precise, charmingly hesitant, anglophiliac accents we heard from those of Columbia’s famous English lit professors who were unfortunate enough to have been born in the USA.

  Despite these affectations, Mickey was, like most of New York’s sophisticates and unlike me, a hick. He came from-I can’t for the life of me recall the name of the place. Not Peoria, but like that. Kenosha. Ashtabula. Moline, maybe. One of those midsize midwestern industrial cities. Anyway, as he told me at that first interview, he was “the scion of a small business empire” that made industrial fasteners. I recall asking him what those might be and he laughed and said he had no idea, but he always imagined an immense zipper the size of a freight train. It was the great-grandfather who’d made the money, and Mickey’s dad and uncles just sat on the board and played golf a lot and were pillars of the community. Apparently there are thousands of such families across this nation, descendants of people who made their pile before taxes and globalization and hung on to it through safe investments and a horror of extravagance.

  And then, inevitably, the talk got around to me, and inspired by his frankness, and sensing that he wished for some urban exoticism in his roommate, I told him that I was the scion of Isaac Mishkin, known to federal investigators and organized criminals from here to Vegas as Izzy the Book, or sometimes Izzy Numbers, a certified public accountant and a bookkeeper to the mob. To which his response was the familiar “I didn’t know there were Jewish gangsters,” and I explained about Murder Inc., Louie Lepke, Kid Reles, and Meyer Lansky, this last person being Dad’s instructor and patron. That was, I believe, the first time I used my family history as a conversational gambit, and marked the end of the kind of shame I had writhed under all through high school. Why could I reveal all to Mickey? Because it was obvious that he had no idea what any of it meant, and regarded it as mere color, as if I’d been born in the circus or in a gypsy caravan. And there was, of course, yet more.

  So you’re Jewish? The natural query from Mickey here; I could tell he was surprised when I said no, actually, I’m not.

  Now I hear the sound of a boat’s motor out on the lake, a distant humming. It’s the middle of the night. No one fishes at night. Or do they? I am not a fisherman myself. Perhaps there are fish that bite in the dark, like mosquitoes, perhaps night fishing is like ice fishing, an unlikely sport but widely practiced by self-torturing fanatics. Or perhaps it’s them.

  Back again. I went out on the deck clutching my weapon and listened, but I heard nothing. It must have been some automatic motor switching on in one of the other cabins. There are several dozen here, widely spaced, apparently deserted now, in the interval between the summer and the skiing season, and sound, I know, can travel amazing distances across the water, especially on so calm a night. I had a flashlight too, and I was so moronic as to turn it on, making myself a perfect target for anyone who might be lurking out there. Although they would not want to just shoot me, oh no, it would not be anything so easy. The sky was heavily overcast, and before I realized the foolishness of the action, I was startled to observe how the blackness over the lake utterly consumed the thin beam. I found this oppressive, depressing: the feeble beam lost in vast darkness. Oh, a little memento mori here? Or merely a reminder of the extremity of my current isolation.

  Reading this over, I see I am still entangled in the distant past; this account will be another Tristram Shandy if I’m not careful, never getting to the fucking point.

  To resume, however: on that particular afternoon, I fed Mickey Haas’s exoticism jones with a little more of my personal history. No, as a matter of fact, I wasn’t Jewish (here a sidebar on the matrilineal-descent rule) because my mother was a Catholic, and in those days, if a Catholic married a non, they were excommunicated unless they made their peace with the church, the main part of which was swearing to raise the kids in the faith and we all were, me and my older brother, Paul, and my sister, the youngest, Miriam, the whole nine yards: baptism, catechism class, first communion, altar service for us boys. And, naturally, lapsing, except for Paul, although Paul lapsed like a bastard, until he un-lapsed and got his Vocation.

  And the cherry on top? Okay, another flashback, and I believe I have time, because I suddenly realized that they would not be so foolish as to try to cross Lake Henry in this darkness, and why should they? So I have all night, I suppose. Anyway, here’s my dad, eighteen years old, a Brooklyn wiseguy in training, a
budding bookmaker of sports bets. Unfortunately for Dad’s career, it was 1944 and he got drafted. Of course, he went to the dons on it, but they said he’d have to go unless he wanted a guy to run an ice pick into his ears, pop his drums, they’d be glad to help out there. He declined.

  So a year or so later, Dad finds himself attached to Third Army headquarters as a cipher clerk, a good job for a nice Jewish boy, clean indoor work, never heard a shot fired in anger; besides it’s March 1945 by now, and for the American forces in Europe, the fun part of World War II is just beginning. The Wehrmacht had essentially stopped fighting in the west and its legions were drifting docilely into the POW cages. The American soldiery soon discovered that anything could be had in exchange for American cigarettes-antiques, heirlooms, girls, unlimited amounts of intoxicants-and Dad was not slow in understanding that here was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to accumulate capital.

  He was stationed in Ulm, where his official duties-coding messages for transmission-were not onerous. His real job was running a black market operation, moving fuel and food from army stores to the hungry civilian economy. He had no trouble setting up an organization, for Germany at the time was well supplied with underemployed thugs. These fellows had simply shed the handsome Nazi regalia they’d worn for twelve years and were open to opportunities in free-market, rather than state-sponsored, gangsterism. Dad was able to help with de-Nazification certificates, of course, and also used his accountancy genius to cover up the pilferage. He had no compunction about using the former Gestapo in his business. I think it tickled him to see these guys meekly taking orders from a Jew, and from time to time he’d covertly feed one of them to the authorities or, worse, to the Jewish revenge underground that was active at the time. It kept the others in line.