The Book of Air and Shadows

by Michael Gruber

  “Good God, Rolly! You don’t have any morals at all, do you?”

  “I don’t do any harm,” she said, glaring. “I don’t even have a high school diploma, and I don’t want to work in a sweatshop or do cleaning, which is the only kind of jobs a woman can get without one. Or whore.”

  “Wait a minute, everyone goes to high school. It’s compulsory.”

  She stopped walking and turned to face him, dropped her head for several breaths, and then looked him straight in the face. “Yes,” she said, “but in my case, when my parents were killed in a car wreck I went to live with my crazy uncle Lloyd, who kept me locked in a root cellar from age eleven to age seventeen, as a result of which I didn’t have the opportunity to attend high school. I got raped a lot though. Now, is there anything else you’d like to know about my goddamned past life?”

  Crosetti gaped and felt his face flush. He could see liquid trembling on her lower eyelids. “I’m sorry,” he croaked. She turned and strode rapidly away, almost running, and after a miserable moment he skulked after her into a tan brick building with a columned entryway and up two flights of stairs, stumbling a little because he was kicking himself so hard. Okay, end of story, expunge her from his mind, he’d done it God only knew how many times before, no stranger to rejection, not usually quite this stupid, not quite so much his own stupid fault, but still he could go out classy, do this business with Bulstrode, a little correct nod and handshake afterward, walk off. God! How could he have been so tooth-hurtingly dumb! Woman tells him she doesn’t want to talk about her past, so of course he does nothing else, and…but here they were, she knocking tap-a-tap on frosted glass and a plummy voice from within, “Yeh-ehss.”

  The man was wearing a vest, or what he would have called a waistcoat, and as they entered he was slipping on the brown tweed suit jacket that went with it: a short plump man in his fifties, with smooth dull pale brown hair worn medium long and arranged so as to hide a bald patch in the center. Jowly, with round tortoiseshell glasses. Hand when shaken unpleasantly soft and moist. Crosetti hated him already; it made a pleasant change from the current self-contempt.

  They sat. She did the talking. Bulstrode was interested in the provenance, the age and origin of the volumes of the Churchill in which the manuscript had been found. She gave these details tersely and, as far as Crosetti could tell, accurately. While this went on he looked around the office, which was small, not much larger than a suburban bathroom, with one dusty window looking out on Amsterdam Avenue. A single glassed-in bookcase, books on only one shelf, otherwise full of stacked papers, untidily arranged. Besides that, two wooden armchairs (in which Rolly and he were sitting), a standard wooden desk somewhat battered, a scatter of papers and journals thereon, and a large framed photograph, whose image Crosetti could not see, although he shifted and peered to the extent propriety allowed.

  “Very interesting, Miss Rolly,” the professor was now saying. “May I examine the documents?”

  Both Rolly and Bulstrode now looked at Crosetti, and he felt his heart sink, as we do when an unfamilar doctor asks us to slip out of our clothes and into a gown. The papers were his, and now they were passing out of his hands, to be confirmed as genuine or rejected as spurious, but by someone else, someone he didn’t know, whose eyes were all funny behind those thick lenses, avid, crazed really, and Rolly’s eyes were blank blue fields with less feeling in them than the sky itself, and he had to resist the urge to grab up his package and flee. But what he did was to pull out only the letter from Richard Bracegirdle to his wife. It was easy to distinguish these pages by feel from the rest of the sheets. Let’s see what this geek had to say about the letter before exposing the ciphered letters was Crosetti’s thinking.

  He slumped in his chair as Bulstrode took the letter and spread the pages out on his desk. It was fear that made him hand them over, a chicken-guts fear of appearing even more stupid in the damned woman’s eyes than he was already. He knew he would never remove the shame of that moment with Rolly from his mind, it would be a lifetime image, bubbling up at random time and again to blight his joy and deepen depression. And also the image of the girl locked in the root cellar listening to the approaching steps of her tormentor, and he’d never now be able to help her with that through love, he’d screwed that up too, you asshole, Crosetti, you complete turd…

  “Can you read it, Professor?”

  This was Rolly; the sound of her voice jerked Crosetti from the dear land of self-flagellation, Bulstrode cleared his throat heavily, and said, “Oh, yes, indeed. The hand is crude but quite clear. A man I imagine who did a good deal of writing. Not an educated man, I think, not a university man, but a writing man all the same. A clerk perhaps? Originally, I mean.” Bulstrode returned to his reading. Time passed, perhaps half an hour, that seemed like time in the dentist’s chair to Crosetti. At last the professor sat up and said, “Hm, yes, in all, a very interesting and valuable document. This,” he continued, pointing, “seems to be the last letter of a man named Richard Bracegirdle, who apparently was wounded at the battle of Edgehill, the first major battle of the English Civil War, which took place on October 23, 1642. He is writing from Banbury, it seems, a town close to the battlefield.”

  “What about Shakespeare?” Crosetti asked.

  Bulstrode regarded him quizzically and blinked behind his thick spectacles. “Excuse me? Did you think there was some reference to Shakespeare in this?”

  “Well, yeah! That’s the whole point. This guy says he spied on Shakespeare. That he had an autograph copy of one of his plays, in fact, that he was the one who got Shakespeare to write one of his plays for the king. It’s right there on the signature page.”

  “Really. Dear me, Mr. Crosetti, I assure you there’s nothing of that sort. Secretary hand can be quite confusing to ah…an amateur, and people can see all sorts of meanings that don’t exist, rather like finding pictures in clouds.”

  “No, look, it’s right here,” said Crosetti and came out of his chair and around the desk. Picking up the manuscript and indicating the relevant lines, he said, “This is the part I mean. It says, ‘They tell all the tale nearly of our spying upon the secret papist Shaxpur. Or so we thought him although now I am less certain. In that manner and bent of life he was a nothing. But certain it is he wrought that play of Scotch M. I commanded of my Lord D. his plot and of him in the king’s name. I find passing strange that all though I am dead and him also yet the play lives still, writ in his own hand and lying where only I know and there may it rest forever.’”

  Bulstrode adjusted his eyeglasses and issued a dry chuckle. He picked up the magnifier he had been using and placed it over a line of text. “Very imaginative, I must say, Mr. Crosetti, but you’re quite mistaken. What this says is, ‘I shall tell to you of the sale of gems secretly proper Salust.’ The man must have been some sort of factor in Salisbury for this Lord D. Then it goes on, ‘Of these thefts I lack shriving. In that manner and bent of life I was a nothing.’ And further along he writes ‘the pearls live still willed by his own hand,’ and he says he alone knows where they are. I’m not entirely sure of what ‘willed by his own hand’ means, but in any case the man was clearly dying and probably in intense distress. He seems to flit from subject to subject. In fact, much of this may be pure fantasy, going through his life in a kind of terminal delirium. But the document is interesting enough as it is without bringing in Shakespeare.”

  “What does the rest of it say?”

  “Oh, it contains a quite vivid description of the battle itself, and these are always of interest to military historians. And apparently he served in the early stages of the Thirty Years’ War, ditto. He was at White Mountain, Lützen, and Breitenfeld, although he gives no detail about these. Pity. A professional artillerist, it seems, and trained as a cannon-founder. He also claims to have made a voyage to the New World and been shipwrecked off Bermuda. A very interesting seventeenth-century life, even a remarkable life, and potentially of great value to certain narrow fields
of study, although I suspect there’s also a touch of Munchausen in his narrative. But nothing about Shakespeare, I’m afraid.” A pause here. Leaden silence for a good thirty seconds; then, “I would be happy to purchase it from you, if you like.”

  Crosetti looked at Carolyn, who returned a neutral stare. He swallowed and asked, “For how much?”

  “Oh, for a Jacobean manuscript of this quality I should think perhaps, ah, thirty-five would be the going rate.”

  “Dollars?”

  An indulgent smile. “Hundred, of course. Thirty-five hundred. I could write you a check now if you like.”

  Crosetti felt his belly twist, and the sweat started to bead up on his forehead. This was wrong. He didn’t know how he knew, but he did. His father had always talked about instinct, although he always called it his gut, how you always went with your gut when you were out on the street in harm’s way. Crosetti’s gut made him say, “Uh, thanks, but I think I’d like a second opinion. I mean on the translation. Um, no offense, Dr. Bulstrode, but I’d like to eliminate the possibility that…” He gestured haphazardly, not willing to put it into words. He had remained standing after handling the manuscript, so it was an easy matter to snatch the papers from Bulstrode’s desk and slip them into the brown paper wrapper. Bulstrode shrugged and said, “Well, suit yourself, although I doubt you’ll get a better price.” Turning then to Carolyn, he asked, “And how is dear Sidney these days? Quite recovered from the shock of the fire I hope.”

  “Yes, he’s fine,” said Carolyn Rolly in a voice so unlike her own that Crosetti stopped wrapping and looked at her. Her face was pained in a way he could not interpret. She said, “Crosetti, would you step outside for a minute with me? Excuse us, Professor.”

  Bulstrode smiled a plump formal smile and gestured to his door.

  Outside, a scant summer population of students and professors passed to and fro; it was clearly the interval between classes. Rolly grabbed Crosetti’s arm and pulled him into an alcove, the first time since the crying jag of the previous evening that she had touched him. She clung to his arm and spoke vehemently in a hoarse tense voice. “Listen! You have to let him have those goddamn papers.”

  “Why do I? He’s obviously trying to pull the wool over our eyes.”

  “Not our eyes, Crosetti. He’s right. There’s no mention of Shakespeare. It’s some petty clerk running a scam and dying and confessing his sins.”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “Why not? What’s your evidence? Wishful thinking and three hours’ experience with secretary hand?”

  “Maybe, but I’m going to show it to someone else, someone I trust.”

  As he said this, he saw her eyes grow fat with tears and her face began to crumple. “Oh, God,” she cried, “oh, God, don’t let me come apart now! Crosetti, don’t you get it? He knows Sidney. Why do you think he mentioned him just now?”

  “Okay, he knows Sidney-so what?”

  “So what! Jesus, man, don’t you see? He knows the manuscript came out of the Voyages, so he knows I’m taking the book apart. And that means…”

  “You’re not just breaking it, like Sidney told you to. You’re trying to doctor it, which means you’re going to try to sell it. And he’s, what? Threatening to tell Sidney unless we give him the manuscript?”

  “Of course! He’ll tell him, and then Sidney…I don’t know, he’ll fire me for sure and he might call the cops. I’ve seen him do it with shoplifters. He’s nuts that way, people stealing books and I can’t…I can’t take the chance…oh, God, this is horrible!”

  She was frankly crying now, not hysterical yet as she was the night before, but building up to it, and that was something Crosetti had no wish to see again. He said, “Hey, calm down! You can’t take what chance?”

  “The cops. I can’t be involved with the police.”

  Lightbulb.

  “You’re a fugitive.” It wasn’t a question. Obvious, really; he should have picked it up right off the bat.

  She nodded.

  “What’s the charge?”

  “Oh, please! Don’t interrogate me!”

  “You didn’t whack Uncle Lloyd?”

  “What? No, of course not. It was some stupid dope thing. I was desperate for money and I moved packages for some people I knew. This was in Kansas, so of course the sky fell in and…oh, God, what am I going to do!”

  “Okay, get yourself together,” he said, resisting the urge to wrap his arms around her. “Go back in there, and tell him it’s a deal.”

  He started to move away and her face stiffened in what seemed like panic; he was happy to note that she clutched at his arm, as at a plank in a shipwreck.

  “Where’re you going?”

  “I just need to do something first,” he said. “Don’t worry, Carolyn, it’s going to be fine. I’ll be back in ten minutes.”

  “What should I tell him?” she demanded.

  “Tell him I got the runs from the excitement of his generous offer and I’m in the bathroom. Ten minutes!”

  He turned and raced down the stairs, three at a time, holding the rolled manuscripts under his arm like a football. Out of Hamilton at a run, he threaded through a quad full of strolling young people who had higher SATs than he did and ran into the vast columned bulk of Butler Library. One advantage of having a well-known research librarian for a mother is that she knows nearly all the other research librarians in the city and is pals with a number of them. Crosetti had known Margaret Park, the head research librarian at Butler, since childhood, and it was an easy matter to call her up and get permission. All big libraries have large-format Xerox machines that can reproduce folio pages; Crosetti used the one in the Butler basement to copy all of Bracegirdle’s papers. He explained to the bemused but amenable Mrs. Park that this was all to do with a movie he had a chance to make (somewhat true) and could he also cadge a mailing tube and buy some stamps?

  He rolled the copies into their tube and added the originals of the ciphered letters and the sermons. As he did this, he wondered why he hadn’t shown them to Bulstrode along with the Bracegirdle letter. Because the guy was an asshole and he was screwing him in some way on this deal, although Crosetti couldn’t prove it, and besides there was Carolyn to consider. But keeping the ciphers to himself gave him an obscure pleasure. Shakespeare or not, the sheets had kept their secrets for four centuries and he was reluctant to let them out of his own hands, he who had brought them into the light. He sealed the tube, wrote out an address label, added postage, dropped the tube into the outgoing mail cart, and trotted back to Hamilton Hall.

  Fifteen minutes later he was walking with Rolly down the center of campus again, but in the opposite direction. Crosetti had a check for thirty-five hundred folded in his wallet and was feeling not exactly good, because he felt he’d been ripped off in a number of ways, but that he’d done the right thing. Doing the right thing had been a major expression around the house while he was being raised. His father had been a detective second grade with the NYPD in an era when to be a detective was to be on the pad, but Charlie Crosetti had not been on the pad, and had suffered for it, until the revelations of Serpico, when the chiefs had cast around for the straight and clean, and found him and promoted him to lieutenant in command of a Queens homicide squad. This was taken as a sign in the Crosetti household that virtue was rewarded. The present Crosetti still tended to believe this, despite all the evidence to the contrary that had accumulated in the years since. The woman walking beside him, however, seemed to set the moral universe on its ear. Yes, she’d been hideously abused (or so she said) but had responded with a kind of desperate amorality, a stance he found hard to condone. Every skell has a hard-luck story, his dad used to say. But he could not consider Carolyn Rolly a mere skell. Why not? His gonads? Because he lusted for her? No, not that either, or not only that. He wanted to ease her pain, make her grin, release the girl he glimpsed hiding under the dour, ascetic bookbinder.

  He studied her trudging along, silent, her head d
own, gripping her roll of book leather. No, he was not going to end it with a handshake at the subway and let her roll off into her own astringent universe again. He stopped and placed his hand on her arm. She looked up, her face blank.

  “Wait,” he said, “what are we doing now?”

  “I have to go to the paper guy in Brooklyn for the endpapers,” she replied glumly. “You don’t have to come.”

  “That can wait. What we’re actually going to do now is go to the Citibank branch over there, on which this check in my wallet is drawn, and cash it. Then we’re going to cab to Bloomie’s, where I will buy a jacket and pants and a shirt and maybe a pair of Italian loafers, and you will buy a dress, with colors in it, something for the summer, and maybe a hat, and we’ll change into our new clothes and we’ll take a cab to a fancy restaurant and have a long, long lunch with wine, and then we’ll-I don’t know-do city stuff, go to museums or art galleries or window-shop until we get hungry again and then go out to dinner and then I will take you in a cab back to your spare and illegal loft and your two chairs and your lonely bed.”

  What was that on her face, he wondered: fear, surprise, delight? She said, “That’s ridiculous.”

  “No it’s not. It’s exactly what felons are supposed to do with their ill-gotten gains. You can be my moll for a day.”

  “You’re not a felon.”

  “I am. I converted my employer’s property to my own use, probably grand larceny if you want to get technical. But I don’t care. Come on, Carolyn! Don’t you ever get tired of grunging around, squeezing every penny while your youth withers a little every day?”

  “I can’t believe I’m hearing this,” she said. “It sounds like a bad movie.”

  “But you don’t go to movies, so how would you know? Putting that aside, you happen to be absolutely right. This is exactly the kind of thing they put in movies, because they want people to feel joy, they want people to identify with beautiful people having fun. And now we’re going to do it, we’re going to imitate art, we’re going to be in our own movie and see what it’s like in real life.”