Although officially lodged in the Third Army headquarters-company barracks, Dad spent most of his time in a suite he maintained in the Kaiserhof Hotel in Ulm. Now, it is one of my father’s eccentricities that he never enters a place of public accommodation through the main, or normal, entrance, but only through the service areas. I think he got this tic from the mobsters of the ’40s, whose habit this also was, when visiting, say, the Copa or El Morocco. It may have had something to do with security, or maybe they did it just because they could; who was going to stop them? In any case, one night in the winter of 1946, returning from a nightclub and approaching the Kaiserhof via its kitchen entrance, he found my mother among the urchins and old ladies rooting through the garbage cans set out there. He ignored them, as he usually did, and they ignored him, except for one who, lifting her head from the filth, said, “Give me cigarette, Joe.”
He looked, and there-only partially disguised by dirt and the soiled rag she wore around her head-was that face. I’ve seen photographs taken around then and it’s quite amazing-she looks just like a younger Carole Lombard, blond and ridiculously exquisite. She was just a week past her seventeenth birthday. Of course he gave her cigarettes, of course he invited her up to his suite, for a bath, some nylons, a change of clothes. He was gaping. How had this creature survived unclaimed in 1945 Germany? Somewhat later, when she was clean and shiny, and draped in a pink silk robe, and he attempted the usual quid pro, he found out why. She had a pistol and she pointed it at him in a determined manner, and told him that war or no war, she was a good girl, the daughter of an officer, that she had shot three men before this and would shoot him too if he attempted to force her virtue. Dad was astounded, he was charmed, he was fascinated. This was, after all, an era when you could fuck a countess for a pound of sugar; that she could have successfully defended her body against a mass of wandering DPs and escaped prisoners, plus the dregs of one defeated army, plus the forces of three victorious ones, indicated a more than ordinary supply of moxie. One of Dad’s words, moxie. According to him, my sister has all of it in our generation, me and my brother are moxie-deficient.
So, faced by the pistol, he relaxed, they had a drink and a smoke, and they exchanged life stories like the teenagers they were. Her name was Ermentrude Stieff. Her parents were dead, her father, the officer, had died in the summer of ’44, and her mother had been killed by a stray bomb in the war’s final weeks. This was in Regensburg. After that she’d wandered through the chaos of the Reich’s final days, dragging the little suitcase she had stashed in her locker at the hospital. People did such prudent things in those days, so if what happened to her ever happened one would not be an utterly destitute refugee. Sometimes she traveled with groups of fleeing civilians, and here she had two means of establishing friendly relations, depending on the nature of the group. One of these items was a yellow star of the kind the Nazis made the Jews wear. The other was a narrow strip of black cloth with the words DAS REICH embroidered on it, which was designed to go around the lower left sleeve of the uniform worn by the soldiers of the Second SS-Panzer Division. She never told Dad where she got the yellow star, but she got the SS unit marker from Hauptsturmführer-SS Helmut Stieff, her father, fallen for the Fatherland in Normandy and, as a matter of fact, eventually buried in that Bitburg cemetery that got President Reagan briefly into trouble some years ago.
This tale says something about the deviousness of both my parents, and about my own character as well, I think, in that I chose to, in a manner of speaking, dine out on it to amuse or impress Mickey Haas that afternoon on 113th Street. It’s the sort of thing many people would want to keep quiet about. My mother, by the way, denied the cute meeting entirely. She claimed she met Dad at a dance and thought that he was a gentleman. She never scrabbled through garbage cans, or shot anyone. She acknowledged that her father was indeed an SS officer, but she was careful to point out to us children the difference between the Waffen and the Allgemein, or general, SS, the people responsible for the camps. The Waffen-SS were brave soldiers fighting the horrible commie Russians.
Rambling. Basically who gives a shit at this juncture? I suppose the only lasting point is that truth was ever flexible in the hands of my parents. Not only was the far past in play, but they also often disagreed violently about events of the previous evening. This bred in me an early cynicism about historical fact, which makes my present situation, as a martyr, in a way, to different versions of four-hundred-year-old events, not a little ironic.
In any case, now we have to flash forward twenty or so years. As I’ve said, I became an intellectual prop lawyer, and Mickey has managed to stay within, nearly, a stone’s throw of where we first met, for he is a professor of English literature at Columbia College. Mickey apparently draws a great deal of water in lit-crit circles. He was president of the Modern Language Association a few years back, which I gather is a big deal, and he seems to be respected with varying degrees of grudgingness by most of the interpretive fiefs into which the literary critical world seems nowadays to be divided. His field of study is William Shakespeare’s plays, which is how he came to know Bulstrode. Professor B. was a visiting scholar at Columbia, also a Shakespeare expert, from the University of Oxford. One day, it seems, Bulstrode comes up to Mickey and says, “Say, old bean, you wouldn’t happen to know an intellectual property lawyer, would you?” and Mickey comes back with, “As a matter of fact, I do.” Or something like that.
Let me recall the day. It was October 11, a Wednesday, the weather a little chilly, so that you knew the summer was over for sure, and there was a threat of rain in the air. People were in raincoats, as was I. I can see my raincoat, a tan Aquascutum, hanging on a coat-stand in the corner of my office, which is smallish for a partner’s office, but comfortable enough. Our building is on Madison in the low Fifties, and through my window I can see one of the monitory spires of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, this view being nearly my sole connection to the religion of my youth. My office is furnished in an unpretentious, vaguely modern manner reminiscent of Jean-Luc Picard’s ready room on the starship Enterprise. I have my diplomas and licenses up on the wall, together with three chrome-framed photographs: one is a professional portrait of my two kids as they looked a few years ago, and another is of me and my son Niko in which I am running alongside him as he learns how to ride a two-wheeler, a quite good shot taken by his mother. The only object in the room that one might consider unusual is the third photograph, which shows a large, crop-haired young man in red-white-and-blue weight-lifting togs holding high a heavy barbell. The barbell is so heavy that it bends slightly at each end, for this athlete is in the 192½ lb+ class, the heaviest, and he is lifting over five hundred pounds. Five hundred thirty-two, to be precise. This person is me, and the photo was shot at the Mexico City games in 1968, where I was part of the U.S. Olympic team. This was more weight than I had ever lifted in the clean-and-jerk and would have got me the bronze medal, but I messed up on the snatch, and Joe Dube took it. I have kept up training since then, at a lower level, of course, but I can still yank somewhat more than a quarter of a ton over my head.
A perfectly useless skill, which is why I like it, why I took it up. I started at ten with a set of homemade weights and lifted all through high school and college. At present I’m a hair over six feet two and I weigh two-fifty, more or less, eighteen-inch neck, fifty-two chest, and the rest to match. Many people take me for a fat person, which I certainly am not. Since the coming of Arnold, people tend to confuse the use of weights to sculpt the body with competitive weight lifting. They are completely different enterprises. Weight lifters almost never have cut or pretty bodies, which are in any case more to do with the absence of subcutaneous fat than with strength. Any serious heavy-class weight lifter could break Mr. Universe over his knee. Only potentially, of course: I have found it to be the case that large, strong people are mild of temperament unless they are into steroids, which is more and more common nowadays, I fear. I remain nonsteroidally mild, however.
I see I have drifted yet again. I was just trying to set myself in my office on the relevant day, which was quite an ordinary one, the morning spent at a meeting about Chinese T-shirt piracy of a rock album image, an increasing part of the normal practice of IP law. Quiet meetings, billable hours, the marshaling of expertise, and the delicate suggestion that lawsuits in this business are largely a waste of time, for Chinese piracy of rock album cover images is an unavoidable cost of doing business in our fallen world. I returned to my own office after this meeting-it was about twenty minutes to twelve and I was already looking forward to lunch-but as I passed my secretary’s desk she hailed me. My secretary is Ms. Olivia Maldonado, a young woman both decorative and competent. Many in the office lust after her, as do I, but it is an iron rule here at Geller Linz Grossbart & Mishkin that we don’t screw around with the staff, a rule I entirely support. It was nearly the sole instance of my forbearance in that department, and I was stupidly proud of it.
I recall she was wearing an outfit I particularly liked, a gray skirt, somewhat clingy, and a dusky rose cardigan sweater with the top two buttons open. Pearl buttons. Her shiny dark hair was wound up on her head and clasped with an amber comb, exposing a small brown beauty mark on the base of her neck, and she had the scent of iris faintly about her.
There was a man waiting to see me, I learned; he had no appointment, could I squeeze him in? A Mr. Bulstrode. Walk-ins are rare in our business-it’s not as if we’re upstairs from the bail bondsman-and I was intrigued.
I went into my office and sat behind my desk and shortly Ms. M. showed the fellow in, man with a briefcase. Bulstrode had dressed his portly form in a brownish three-piece suit of well-worn tweeds and wore tortoiseshell spectacles on his little marshmallow of a nose. Worn Burberry draped over arm, good oxblood shoes on his feet and a paisley square in the breast pocket; thin snuff-colored hair moderately long and combed across the scalp, a little vanity there. His face was flushed, up from the neck and across the cheeks. He blinked colorless lashes at me as we shook hands (soft, dampish). I thought “professor” and I was correct: he introduced himself as Andrew Bulstrode, a professor indeed, late of Oxford in the U.K. and visiting at Columbia. Professor Haas good enough to give me your name…
I sat him and after the usual chat asked what I could do for him. He said he wanted some IP advice. I said he’d come to the right place. Asked if he could put me a hypothetical. I don’t like hypotheticals because when the client talks in hypotheticals it usually means he’s not going to be frank about the real. But I gave him the nod. Suppose, he said, that I discovered a manuscript of a literary work, a lost literary work. Who would own the rights to it? I said, that would depend. Author dead? Yes. Before or after 1933? Before. Heirs or assigns? None. I told him that under the U.S. Copyright Revision Act of 1978, unpublished manuscripts created before January 1, 1978, by authors who died before 1933, became part of the public domain on January 1, 2003. His face fell a little at that, from which I gathered that he had wanted a different answer, such as that what he had discovered might be copyrightable. He asked whether by chance I knew the relevant law obtaining in the United Kingdom, and I was happy to answer that I did, for our firm does a good deal of consultation back and forth across the gray Atlantic. I told him that the U.K. was friendlier to creators than the U.S., to wit: that the author had indefinite common law copyright to unpublished work, and if published or performed, the copyright ran fifty years from first publication or performance. The author being dead in our case, I continued, the copyright would run fifty years from the calendar year in which the provision of the Copyright Act of 1988 came into force, i.e., fifty years from January 1, 1990.
Here he nodded and asked about ownership-who held the copyright in an unpublished manuscript of a deceased author? I explained that under British law, unless ownership was established by testamentary evidence, such copyright reverted, under U.K. intestacy law, to the Crown. I love saying that, by the way, the Crown; the image of Elizabeth II R rubbing her hands in glee as the lucre pours in, corgis yapping around the piles of bright guineas.
He didn’t like this part either. Surely not, he said. What ever happened to finders keepers? What about possession being nine-tenths of the law?
To which I answered that these saws were true enough, but also that should he publish or perform such a work he should be prepared to have the Crown come after him, and if he published or performed in the U.S., he might have a hard time defending his copyright from outright piracy; and now would he care to leave the hypothetical and tell me what was going on?
I said this in a manner that suggested I was about to wish him good day were he not prepared to be more forthcoming. He considered the request for some time in silence, and I observed that sweat beads had accumulated on his forehead and upper lip, although it was cool in my office. At the time I thought he might be ill. It did not occur to me that he was badly frightened.
I have been in this business long enough to tell when a client is being frank and when not, and Professor Bulstrode was clearly in the latter class. He said he had come into possession (that’s a phrase that always raises my hackles) of documentary evidence, a manuscript from the seventeenth century, a personal letter from a man named Richard Bracegirdle to his wife. He thought this manuscript was genuine, and that it revealed the existence of a certain literary Work, of enormous potential import to scholarship, the existence of which had never been suspected. This manuscript alone was enough to launch a field of study, but to have The Work itself…
When he said The Work, I heard the capital letters and so I include them here.
What is The Work? I asked.
Here he demurred, asking instead about the protocols of confidentiality between lawyer and client. I explained that our normal retainer was twenty-five hundred dollars and that once his check was in my hands no power on earth could extract the substance of any conversation the two of us might have, save only an admission that he was about to commit a felony. With that, he drew out a leather-covered checkbook, wrote out the check, and handed it over. Then he asked me if we had a safe on the premises. I said we had locked, armored, fireproof files. Not good enough. I said we had an arrangement with the Citibank downstairs, a large safe-deposit box. He opened his briefcase and handed me a heavily taped manila envelope. Would I secure this for him, temporarily?
There’s that engine noise again.
THE BRACEGIRDLE LETTER (1)
Banbury 25th Octobr. Ann. Dom. 1642
My dear goode wife may the blessinges of almighty God be upon you & oure sonne. Well Nan I am killed as you fortolde & I bid you have a care with youre foretellinges lest they take you up for a witch, for I am shot threw the tripes with a balle it is lodged in my spine or so saith the chiurgeon here; his name is Tolson & a trew Christian man: Tom Cromer my matrosse you will recall hym a goode loyal boye though he ran in the fight did return & find mee among the fallen & found a horse & brought mee here to Banbury-towne. Mr Tolson is lodging me for 2d per daye all founde a good price in these tymes but he sayes my case is such as I will never pay so much as a shillinge & so I write my laste before I am taken uppe to heavene as I hope or (what is more lykley) put down in the fierie pitte as I am sure by my lyfe I am not one of the Electe. But it is in Gods handes & I caste myselfe uppon his mercy.
This was the waye of it. You knowe we marched out late in sommer from London in the artillerie park of my Lord Essex his army when the King refused the rights of Parliament & made to bring his power gainst his owne people to crush theyre liberties. At Northhampton we hearde that the King wase at Worcester & on the road south so we hastened in a craweling waye to place oure armes between him & London. We failed this through want of speede & our force was spread out across the lande: yet hearing the King was to attack Banbury we rallyed us & gathered north of there near Kineton towne & there the King turned & met us.
Now you know Nan that Warre is like the game children play with paper, stone & fyre as: paper covereth
stone, stone crusheth fyre, &c: & the figure I intend is this-horse can capture gonnes, for wee may fyre one volley but then they are upon us before we can shoote again. Foot can defeat horse, for the horsemen will not dare the wall of pike, so your foot must guard the gonnes in batterie: the gonnes can smash the pike battalions of the enemie into disarray, so the horse can get at ’em. Thus the generals art is to make all work together. So wee had set up our batterie & made good practice that morning having more gonnes than the royales did & had a shotte at the Kinges partie but not the range which wase too bad but could see him beneath the royal banner & Prince Rupert and otheres of his trayne. Wee were guarded afront by Sir Nicholas Byrons troop being the last on the left flanke of oure force oure flanke resting upon a hedge and som woods.
Then the Kinges horse attacked on oure right & wee could see the smoakes & banneres flying & what happened but oure right being pressed back, oure left shifted thereto, a thinge most common in battel & the wyse guard against it. But these fellowes were scarce skilled in warre & soe they moved & soe our left flanke came loose from the hedges & hung in aire. Now Nan twere never good practice to trail a flanke before Rupert of the Rhine. You well know I have sayde that they are noddles in the mayne who serve the King but they are cavaliers for all that & the one thynge they can doe is charge with sword and pistol: soe with a greate crie they did. They struck us hard & rolled up oure foote like drapers linen & then they were upon the gonnes. I snatched up a partizan & made to defend my piece (for though the gonnes fly no colours and hath not honour so tis sayde, yet I would be shamed to see my pieces lightly taken) but a cavalier stod off & shot his carbine at me & I fell & lay there all the day, not beeing able to feele or move my legges until young Tom found me when dusk wase nigh, & carreyed mee to where I now am to die. I know not even now who won the daye.
The Book of Air and Shadows Page 2