The Book of Air and Shadows

by Michael Gruber

  Now returning to England on the first ship landeing Plymouth 6th July & wisht to goe to London for I desyred to turn my bill to gold coyne at some Jewes counting-house & shew youre father that I wase a fit man to have my deare Nan. Soe I did takeing boat next daye & found my Jewe and walked in my pryde with a heavie purse; but comeing thereafter to the Iron Man Inn & askeing wase told that some moneths before this thou wast wed to Thomas Finch fishmonger of Puddyng Lane.

  Then was my heart sore for I had lade all my hopes on that marriage, haveing mee now no familie nor friendes nor home: & besydes Mr Tollivers fancies had worne to nubbin my olde faith in the pure religione & knew not what to think but considered I wase likely damned to Hell & did not cayre, or not much. Thus are sowles lost. Yet I had gold: & friendes of a sorte can always be got if you have it, so roistered many weekes Nan, I would I had not nor will I saye what foul thynges I did doe in that passage but awoke one morn in Plymouth in a trulls bedde & 2s. 3d. was all I had in purse. Now among my fellowe sottes there wase one Cranshaw who called hymself a gentleman of the coste, which interpreted is a smuckler & he says you are a stout fellow Dick & know the shiftes, come we wille grow rich together with bringeing in canary, sacke & other goodes from sea. Soe we did for some time. But that Cranshaw was as fond of drinking sacke as selling it & worked so ill & clumsy, boasting in tavernes & the lyke that one night the coste guardes took us & clapped us bothe in fetteres & soe caste in the Tower.

  There Mr Hastynges kindlie came & visited me & he says lad you are for the rope sure nothynge can save thee, caught with uncustommed goodes: what foole thou-why camest thee not to mee, shall I denie thee worke? And I was sore ashamed to be brought so low. Yet I commenced to praye agaen which I had not for soe long & it did me confort, methoughte Gods mercie mayhap wold save e’en one such as mee, for Christ came to save sinners not the righteous.

  Now Nan you knew all this or almost all, and twas for younge Richard I have wrote it out so I may speake fatherly to hym from the Grave: but now I shall tell what no man knowes except they were there & I alone yet live. Of a morn, mee lying in filthie straws in chaynes & thinking of how many better than I wast once so enchayned for Gods sake and wishing I was one of theyre number instod of what I wase a kynde of robbinge knave, there comes a warder saying, here rise & he unshackels mee & bringeth water to washe and attend my bearde and new cloathes. Soe he beckones & I must followe. Thus to a small roome in the White Tower, new rushes on the floore and a good fyre, tabel and chayres and meate upon the tabel & canary in cuppes & a man there, a stranger saying sit, eate.

  9

  Gosh, I’m sorry,” she gasped, pulling away from me in confusion. “You must think I’m awful. I don’t even know why I did that.”

  “An instinctive reaction to danger escaped?” I suggested. “A kind of inherited reflex. The male rescues the female from danger, and saves the woolly mammoth cutlets, and the female repays him with a sexual display.” I added, after a pause, “I’m sure it was nothing personal,” hoping the opposite. She just stared at me. I opened the door to the building. “Are you all right? You’re not hurt?”

  “A little bruised. And my knees are scraped. Ow!” At this, she staggered against me, trembling.

  “We’re three flights up,” I said and put my arm around her shoulders. “Can you walk?”

  “I don’t know. I just went all weak in the knees.”

  “It’s the adrenaline. Here, let me help you.” With that I picked her up in the approved carrying-over-threshold manner and ascended the stairs. She slumped against me and did not object. Myself, I was still dizzy from the kiss.

  I settled her on a sofa, supplied us both with a cognac, and went to fetch my first-aid kit and a plastic bag of ice. She had removed her ruined panty hose and had her skirt hitched up to expose her naked thighs. I gave her the ice bag to use on whichever of her bruises seemed most to need it while I bathed and dressed her knees as I had learned to do long ago in the army. I had to lean fairly close in order to pick out the tiny pieces of street debris. The erotic charge I received from this labor was nearly too much to bear, my face there close to, inches from, her delicious thighs, these lolling slightly open to enable my ministrations. I imagined she felt this too, but she said nothing, and I was able, just, to keep from diving headfirst into the shadow of that hitched-up skirt. I suppose I wished to hang a little longer under that delicious tension, something I got to enjoy when I was courting Amalie, and which we have most of us lost in this era of copulation lite.

  She didn’t speak while I worked on her. When the dressing was complete, she thanked me and asked, “What did you do to that guy? Some kind of judo?”

  I answered that I was a stranger to any martial art, but simply very strong, and I explained why. She took this in without comment and asked if I knew any of the muggers.

  “No, of course not. Did you?”

  “No, but I thought one of them was the same one who was watching me the other day, the big one who you hit over the head with his friend. It looked like the same SUV too. They were speaking Russian, weren’t they?”

  “I believe so. I don’t speak it myself, but I go to a gym run by a Russian and I hear the language a lot. And you had that man on the phone with an accent…”

  At this Miranda twisted her body so that she faced the back of the sofa and clutched a throw pillow over her head. Muffled sounds emerged.

  Is this level of detail important? What does it matter at the present remove what one person said to another? For the record: she cried, I comforted her. And yes, I am enough of a cad to seduce a woman in an extreme state of dependent panic. She sighed and fell against me, her mouth against my neck. I scooped her up and carried her into my daughter’s bedroom. I put her on the bed and carefully removed her clothes-blouse, skirt, bra, underpants-she not helping much but not objecting either. I have to say that it was not, despite my ardor, anywhere near the Top 40, not remotely in the same class as Amalie, although their bodies were remarkably similar, the musculature and structure of the limbs, the pointed pink nipples.

  Miranda lay not exactly comatose but as one in a dream, eyes closed. Something was going on, because she was making those little puffings with her lips that some women do when they are experiencing sexual pleasure, and she did that head-coming-up-off-the-pillow thing a few times, with her wide brow furrowed, as if in quiz-show concentration. In the end she made a sharp single cry, like a small dog hit by traffic. Then she rolled over without a word and seemed to go to sleep, in the manner of a guy married for years.

  On the other hand, the first one is occasionally a dud. I kissed her on the cheek (no response) and covered her with a duvet. In the morning, I heard the shower go on early, and when I arrived in the kitchen she was there, fully dressed, looking fresh, asking if we could stop for a new pair of panty hose. No comment on the sexual events of the previous night and none of that familiarity of the body one more or less expects after a fuck of whatever quality. Nor did I raise the subject at that time.

  I must have drifted off because it is light and my watch says it is after six in the morning. There is a thick fog on the lake and dew gleams on every leaf and needle of the trees. The risen sun is only a bright pink glow in the clouds over the eastern shore of the lake. Very strange and unearthly, like being inside a pearl. My pistol is broken open on the desk, the magazine removed and the seven bright 9 mm Parabellum rounds are lined up next to it like toy soldiers. I have no memory of doing this. Could I have done it in my sleep? Perhaps I’m going slightly nuts, from the tension and the lack of sleep and from my perfectly fucked-up life. Seven rounds. There were originally eight.

  You know, you read in the paper about people who have a firearm in the house and the kid gets hold of it and does something awful, the lesson being that kids will always find the gun, no matter how carefully the parent has hidden it, but as far as I know none of us ever found our mother’s Pistole-08, none of us even knew she had it. I suppose she was a genius at concealment, a tr
ait her children have inherited to an extent. My siblings don’t know I have it, or perhaps they are themselves concealing this knowledge. It took some doing, since technically it is an unlicensed weapon, but those with connections can usually get what they want in the city of New York, and at the time of my mother’s death I was working for one of these, a fine legal gentleman named Benjamin Sobel. When I explained the situation to him he arranged for the police to return the thing to me, although I did not expatiate upon its provenance. A valuable souvenir of the war, I explained, that could be sold to pay for the funeral expenses. But I didn’t sell it, and the expenses were slight. Paul was in jail, and Miri was off on someone’s yacht, and so it was a small band of strangers at the cheap funeral home, some people from her church and her work at the hospital, and me; her priest did not show, I assume because of the circumstances of the death, one of the sins for which I have not been able to forgive my church.

  I kept her ashes in a tin can in my apartment until I got my first job and then I bought her a slot in a community mausoleum at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, not too far from Albert Anastasia, Joey Gallo, and L. Frank Baum, the author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, so she’s in good company. I believe I have forgiven her, although how does one really tell? I have never figured that part out. I know she was making a point because she knew I was on my way back to Brooklyn that Saturday afternoon. As the Official Good Son, I often submitted to mass at St. Jerome’s, preceded and followed by heavy Teutonic dinners and evenings of TV or cards. This particular Saturday, she had actually put the dinner on, sweet and sour tongue with dumplings, one of my favorites actually, and its odor filled the apartment as I walked into the kitchen and found her. She had arranged the chair she sat in just so and spread newspapers all around so as not to make a mess when she put the muzzle in her mouth.

  I relate this to demonstrate my near-perfect insensitivity to the interior states of my dear ones, which I suppose is a key to some aspects of this story. I really had no idea at all, although I saw poor Mutti nearly every week. Yes, Ermentrude played her cards pretty close, but still, shouldn’t I have suspected something? Some terminal depression? I did not, nor was there a note. Forty-four years old.

  Earlier, before I entered my terrible puberty, we were unusually close. During my ninth year, by some happy coincidence, I had an early school day and my mother had moved to the late shift at her hospital, so we met and had biweekly Oedipal Theater. She would bake treats for me on those days, marvelous Bavarian delights rich with nuts, cinnamon, raisins, stuffed into leaf pastry thin as hope, and the smell would hit my nose in the hallway as I left the urine-stinking elevator, like a presagement of paradise. And we would talk, or she would talk, mainly reminiscences of her girlhood, her marvelous girlhood in the New Germany-the music, the parades, how beautiful the men looked in their uniforms, how wonderful her father, how kind everyone was to her. She actually served as one of those little blondies you see in old newsreels presenting a bouquet to the Führer on an official visit. It was set up through her dad’s contacts in the Party, and she recalled every detail, how proud she was, how the Führer had cupped her little face in his hand and patted her cheek. Yes, the cheek I kissed every day. Lucky Jake!

  About the bad stuff that came later, not so much talking. I don’t like sinking about zose days, she said, only of zhe happy times I like to sink. But I pressed and learned about the rats and the flies, the absence of pets, the smell, what it was like to be bombed from the air, more about the smells, the exploded bodies of her friends and their parents, the peculiar juxtapositions created by blast, the bathtub blown through a schoolhouse wall and resting on the teacher’s desk. How the children laughed!

  When I cleaned out her stuff I found a trove of family memorabilia that she’d never shown us, but which she must have been carrying around in her suitcase when she met Dad: letters home from the various fronts, photographs of the family, school certificates, vacation postcards. It included a good deal of Nazi stuff, of course, awards from the SS, my grandfather’s various medals, and the rosewood presentation case for the pistol. One photograph in particular I rescued and later had framed, and it is still in my bedroom. It is of her family, just before the war started, at some beach resort. She’s about ten or eleven, lovely as a nymph, and the two older brothers are there in their old-fashioned knit bathing suits, grinning blondly into the sun, and my grandmother is looking quite svelte in a one-piece suit, reclining in a deck chair and laughing; and leaning over her, sharing the joke, is the then Hauptsturmführer-SS Stieff. He has obviously just come to the beach from work, for he is in tie and shirtsleeves and carrying his tunic, accoutrements and hat, and unless you look very carefully, you can’t see what kind of uniform it is.

  I like this picture because of how happy they all look, although they lived under the worst regime in human history and the father of the family worked for an organization bent on genocide. In contrast, there are no such pictures of my family, for although we had our laughs, my father was not into photography, and, unlike his late father-in-law, had a positive horror of being captured on film. The only family pictures we have are stilted department store poses taken on our birthdays or else records of events-first communions, graduations, and so on, plus many snapshots taken by neighbors or strangers, for, as I have suggested, with the exception of myself, my family is unusually photogenic.

  No, let’s tear ourselves away from the distant past (if only!) and back to the main story. Miranda and I agreed that she could not be left alone. I made arrangements for Omar to come by and exercise his protective skills, and further arranged that he should stay over and add a little firepower in case they tried anything else once they found that the briefcase lacked what they wanted. This left the question of why Russian-speaking toughs had become interested in Richard Bracegirdle’s personal history. Could Bulstrode have had some original connection with them? I asked Miranda and she looked at me like I was crazy. Uncle Andrew hardly knew anyone in New York aside from scholars, and he had never so much as mentioned any Russians, criminal or otherwise. Freelance thugs then? More likely. Despite the fictions of TV, organized crime has become somewhat more Russian in the past few decades: the Mafiya, so called, but not by the Russians. Someone looking for frighteners, strong-arm guys, torturers, had found a contractor. Who this person was remained obscure, but finding him (as I now explained to Miranda) was not our job. What we had to do was keep her safe, which I thought Omar could handle, and turn the recent developments over to the police.

  Around eight, a fellow called Rashid came by from a hire agency to drive me to work. I left Omar in the loft with Miranda, with instructions not to let her out of his sight, and I cut short his eager description of how well armed he was. I didn’t want to know. At the office, I called Detective Murray and related what had happened the previous night. He asked if I had the license plate of the car and I said I hadn’t and he said he didn’t see that there was much that he could do about the loss of a briefcase, and he’d transfer me to an officer who’d give me a case number for my insurance. I got a little steamed at that and pointed out that this incident must be related to the murder of Andrew Bulstrode, which he was supposed to be investigating, and there was a pause on the line after which the detective asked with heavy patience how I figured that. And then I told him about Ms. Kellogg and how someone with an accent was trying to get an old manuscript from her, one that Bulstrode had owned, and how the men who had attacked us had spoken in what seemed like Russian, and it had to be all connected. He asked me what this manuscript was worth and I told him Bulstrode had bought it for a couple of thousand dollars, but…

  And here I checked, because all beyond that was speculation, all the Shakespeare business, and I knew how it would sound to a New York cop, and so I concluded the conversation rather lamely and suffered being put on hold and, when at last unheld, reported the petty mugging to a bored man and received my case number. Then I called J. Ping and got the scoop on the status of Bulst
rode’s will, with which she saw no obvious trouble, perfectly straightforward, a month should see it through surrogate’s court, and asked me if there was any big rush on, and I said, no, quite the contrary, no rush at all. The decedent’s body, I learned, was due to be flown out that day, in care of one Oliver March, presumably the longtime companion I had heard about.

  I skipped lunch that day, my diary says, and went to the gym, although it was not my regular gym day. I wished to talk to someone about Russians, and the gym was as good a place to do that as I had at my disposal. When I arrived, however, it was Arkady who wanted to talk to me. He took me into his tiny office, a cluttered industrial-carpeted place with hardly room for a desk and a few chairs, which desk was nearly invisible under a mass of lifting magazines and defective lumps of gear and samples of diet supplements, some of them even legal for use in Olympic events. There was a glass case in the office holding Arkady’s remarkable array of medals and cups-the old U.S.S.R. certainly did not stint its darlings-and the walls were plastered with many more triumphant photos than I owned myself. Arkady Demichevski is squat and hairy, with deep-set small brown eyes and a twenty-inch neck. He looks like an early hominid but is a civilized, cultured, and kind man, with a good sense of humor. Today he was uncharacteristically solemn.

  “Jake,” he said, “we need talk.”

  I indicated that he had the floor, and noted that he could not seem to meet my eye. “Jake, you know I don’t care what peoples who come to my gym do on outside. Is their life, yes? They behave in gym, they could stay, if not…” Here he tossed an imaginary object over his shoulder and made a zipping sound. “So, Jake, I know you for long time and I am embarrassed to ask what you are mixed up in, some…some…bizniss, with bad peoples.”