The Book of Air and Shadows

by Michael Gruber

  No, she was not; no, I did not know why anyone would have taken her; they only wanted the manuscript. Why did they want the manuscript, Mr. Mishkin? Was it very valuable? Not as such, but some people thought it could lead to something very valuable. Oh, like a treasure map? Here the eye rolling started, the smirking. And here I said something like, “You can smirk all you want to, but a man was tortured to death to reveal the whereabouts of that thing, and now a woman has been kidnapped, and you’re still treating the whole thing as a joke.” And then we had a discussion about Professor Bulstrode.

  In fairness, this was the sort of thing that urban police detectives rarely encounter. They wanted it to be a domestic with elements of rich-guy looniness. The police covered surfaces with black fingerprint powder, took many photos, took Omar’s gun and samples of the blood he had shed in my service, and left, saying they would be in touch. As soon as they were gone I went out myself, to the garage on Hudson where Rashid had parked the Lincoln, and drove to St. Vincent’s Hospital to check on Omar. I was unsurprised to see the two detectives there, and I couldn’t get in to see him until they had finished extracting the nothing he knew. The hospital wanted to keep him overnight for observation because of the concussion, and so I left him with the assurance that I would contact his family and that he must not worry about the expenses.

  I made that unpleasant call from my cell phone and I was just putting it away when it buzzed again and it was Miranda.

  “Where are you? Are you all right?” was naturally (and stupidly) the first thing out of my mouth, although I knew she could not answer the first question and that the answer to the second was dreadfully patent.

  “I’m fine.” In a voice that was not fine at all.

  “Where are you?” Stupid!

  “I don’t know. They put a bag over my head. Look, Jake, you can’t call the police. They said I should call you and tell you that.”

  “All right, I won’t,” I lied.

  “Is Omar all right? They hit him…”

  “Omar is fine. What do they want? They have the goddamned letter-why did they have to take you?”

  “They want the other letters, the ones written in cipher.”

  “I don’t understand-I gave you everything that your uncle gave me. I don’t know anything about any cipher.”

  “No, they were there in the original find. There’s a woman here, Carolyn-I think they’re holding her too…”

  “A Russian?”

  “No, an American. She says that there were coded letters in the package but someone didn’t deliver them like they were supposed to.”

  “Who didn’t?”

  “It’s not important. These people say they own the documents, they say they paid my uncle cash for them, a lot of cash, and that he tried to cheat them. Jake, they’re going to…”

  Actually it’s too painful to try and reconstruct this dialogue. We were both yelling into the phone (although I am ordinarily careful never to raise my voice into a cell phone as so many of my fellow citizens do, so that the streets often appear to be taken over by the mad; and I often wonder what the truly mad think of this) and someone cut her off in midsentence. The burden of the conversation was clear; unless I came up with some ciphered letters mentioned by Bracegirdle they would handle her as they had her uncle, and also that, if they thought that the police were involved, they would dispose of her instantly.

  Gunshots in the fog, three flat, concussive noises from the lake, and there is definitely the sound of a motor craft, an insectile buzz that sounds as if it comes from a long way off. Hunters? Is this duck season? I have no idea. In case not, I have just reloaded and cocked my pistol, a comforting activity I find. I should have said before this that Mickey’s cabin is at the extreme southern end of Lake Henry. There is a detailed hydrographic chart of the lake framed on the living room wall, and on it you can see that it was originally two lakes. Around 1900, the summering plutocrats who owned the land dammed an outlet and the water rose and left a string of islands extending out from the eastern shore, an excellent place to play pirates, Mickey has informed me, but you can’t drive a boat of any size between them because of hidden rocks. You get to this house either via New Weimar and a long slow drive down a third-rate road and a further drive on a gravel one (which is what I did) or you can get off the thruway at Underwood and take a short drive on a good road to the town of Lake Henry at the lake’s extreme northern tip and get into your mahogany speedboat and, after a twelve-mile jaunt, arrive in more style, which is the route Mickey and his family almost always traveled. The land route is actually shorter by a little over an hour, but a lot less comfortable. If I were a stylish sort of thug, I would rent or buy a motor craft, come south from the town, whack my guy, and then on the way back dump the corpse, suitably weighted, into the lake, which is nearly sixty feet deep at its greatest depth, not quite farther than did ever plummet sound, but deep enough.

  Examining my diary for the following day I find that the morning meetings are scratched out and I remember that I called in after a nearly sleepless night and spoke with Ms. Maldonado. I asked her to cancel these appointments and reschedule them and asked her one important question, to which the answer was yes. Ms. Maldonado makes two copies of absolutely everything, she is the Princess of Xerox, and it turned out that she had indeed made copies of the Bracegirdle manuscript. Then Omar called me begging to be rescued from the hospital, so I went and got him. He took the wheel gladly, looking in his white medical turban more like his desert ancestors than he usually did. As he proudly informed me, he had another gun; I did not wish to inquire further.

  At my direction, we picked up the Bracegirdle copies at my office and proceeded north on the East River Drive to Harlem. Although I questioned him again about the previous night’s events, he could add nothing, except an apology for having been cold-cocked and losing his charge. He could not imagine how someone had got into the loft and into position to surprise him in that way, and neither could I-another mystery added to those already accumulated in this affair.

  Our destination that morning was a group of tenement buildings on 151st Street off Frederick Douglass Boulevard that my brother, Paul, owns, or rather operates, since he doesn’t officially own anything. He picked them up as burned husks at a tax sale some years ago when buildings of this type were burning almost daily and has renovated them into what he refers to as an urban monastery. Paul is a Jesuit priest, a perhaps surprising revelation, since the last time I mentioned him he was a jailed thug. He is still something of a thug, which is why I went to visit him after Miranda disappeared. He has a profound understanding of violent evil.

  I suppose that one of the great shocks of my life was the discovery that Paul was smart, probably smarter than me in many ways. Many families assign roles to their members, and in our family Miriam was the dumb beauty, I was the smart one, and Paul was the tough one, the black sheep. He never did a day’s work in school, dropped out at seventeen, and as I mentioned, did a twenty-six-month jolt in Auburn for armed robbery. You can imagine the fate of a handsome, blond, white boy in Auburn. The usual choice is to be raped by everyone or raped exclusively by one of the big yard bulls. Paul chose the latter course as being healthier and safer and submitted to this fellow’s attentions until he had fashioned a shank, whereupon he fell upon the yard bull one night while he slept and stabbed him a remarkable number of times (although fortunately not quite to death). Paul spent the rest of his prison time in solitary, along with the child molesters and Mafia informants. He became a reader there, which I know about because every month I used to make up a package of books for him in response to his requests. In two years I observed in amazement his progression from pulp fiction, to good fiction, to philosophy and history, and finally theology. By the time he made parole he was reading Küng and Rahner.

  Upon his release, he immediately joined the army, having no other prospects and desiring an education. This was at the height of the Vietnam War and they were not being too par
ticular. I suppose the grand-paternal Stieff genes must have kicked in because he proved to be an exemplary soldier: airborne, Ranger, Special Forces, Silver Star. He spent his two tours largely back in the Shans, as we used to say, in the contested region where Laos, Vietnam, and Cambodia come together, running with a band of montagnards just like Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now. This is virtually Paul’s only comment on that experience: it was just like the movie.

  Strangely enough, the horror, the horror, did not make him into a monster but into something like a saint. He went to St. John’s on the G.I. Bill and then signed up for the Jesuits. When he told me this I thought he was joking, I mean the notion of Paul as a priest, much less a Jesuit, but it goes to show that you can never tell about one’s near and dear. I was, as I say, totally flabbergasted.

  In any event, he returned to New York with the idea of building a kind of settlement house in a blighted neighborhood, and so he did, but being Paul and considering the social experiment tradition of the Society of Jesus, the thing had a certain twist; he was easily distinguishable from Jane Addams. I say he was a saint, but he also remained a thug. There are a number of these types in the calendar of the saints, including, for one, the founder of Paul’s own order. Paul’s theory is that our civilization is collapsing into a dark age and that the advancing edges of this are visible in urban ghettos. He says dark ages are all about forgetting civilization and its arts and also the increasing reluctance of the ruling classes to pay for civic life. This sealed the fate of Rome, he claims. He doesn’t think that the ghetto needs uplift, however, but rather that when the crash comes, the poor will survive better than their masters. They need less, he says, and they are more charitable, and they don’t have to unlearn as much. This was why Jesus preferred them. Yes, quite crazy; but when I observe the perfect helplessness of my fellow citizens of the middle class and higher, our utter dependence on electricity, cheap gas, and the physical service of unseen millions, our reluctance to pay our fair share, our absurd gated enclaves, our “good buildings,” and our incompetence at any task other than the manipulation of symbols, I often think he has a point.

  So Paul has constructed, under the guise of a mission church and a school, a kind of early medieval abbey. It consists of three buildings, or rather two buildings and the empty space between them once occupied by a tenement totally gutted by the fire and later demolished. This space is fronted on the street by a wall and a gate and through this gate walked Omar and I that day. It is always open. (We left the limo on the street. Such is the authority of the place that I was sure no one would molest it.) The footprint of the former building is now a sort of cloister, with a vegetable garden, a little terrace with a fountain, and a playground. One of the buildings is a K-12 school, partially residential, and the other consists of offices, dormitories, and workshops. There is a L’Arche community on site, which is a group that lives with and cares for severely disabled people, and there is also a part-time medical clinic and a Catholic Worker soup kitchen. The place was its usual chaos: the halt, mad, and crippled doing their thing, clumps of robed rehabilitated gangsters working at various tasks, and neatly uniformed schoolchildren racing about, quite the medieval scene. Omar always feels entirely at home here.

  I came to Paul on this occasion because his intelligence has a devious edge to it, rather like that of our dad. I am an infant in comparison, and although it often galls me to depend on my brother in this way, I occasionally do. He says it is good for my soul.

  We found him in the basement of the school building discussing a boiler with some contractors. He was wearing a blue coverall and was quite filthy, although Paul makes even dirt look good. He is somewhat shorter than I am but far more elegantly built. To my eye he has not changed much from what he looked like when I picked him up at the airport on his return from the army nearly twenty-five years ago, except his hair is longer on top. He still resembles Rutger Hauer in Blade Runner or an SS recruiting poster. He gave us a big smile, white teeth gleaming in the dim basement, and embraced both of us. Leaving the contractors to their work with a few more words, he ran us up to his office, a tiny cramped room with a view of the terrace/cloister and the playground, and of course he wanted to know about Omar’s head. I think he likes Omar somewhat more than he likes me. No, that’s a lie, but let it sit there on the page. Paul loves me, and it drives me nuts. I am not at all nice to him. I can’t help it. I think it is Izzy’s introjection boiling up from inside me, full of contemptuous disdain.

  After Paul got the whole story out of Omar, and after he’d heard a good deal of tedious data about Omar’s family and the suffering of his relations on the West Bank, Omar excused himself for his noon prayers. Just after he left, an exquisite brown boy trotted in with a message, looking remarkably fine in his school uniform, which is a navy blazer, gray slacks, white shirt, and a white-and-black striped tie. When he had gone I said, rolling my eyes, “Getting any of that now? Peachy buttocks glowing in the dim sacristy lamplight…”

  “Elderly nuns satisfy my residual lusts, thank you,” he said, still smiling. “And speaking of sexual excess, you seem to have got yourself in a jam again over a woman. Who is this Miranda?”

  “No one special, just a client. I only had her stay at my place because some people seemed to be following her.”

  “Uh-huh. You know, Amalie called me this morning. She seemed pretty upset.”

  “Well, gosh, Paul, I’m sorry Amalie’s upset. I know! Why don’t you marry her. Then you can be all perfect together and I can sink further into depravity. Me and Miri-”

  “Miri’s worried about you too. What’s all this about Russian gangsters?”

  Another thing that drives me crazy is my family talking about me behind my back. One reason I try to live a blameless life (the sex part aside) is to reduce the zone of gossip, but clearly I have failed in this. I suppressed whatever I might have felt at the time because the entire purpose of my visit was to seek Paul’s counsel in this affair. No one I know has a wider network of contacts at all levels of society in New York, from street bums to the mayor. So I gave him the whole tale-Bulstrode, the Bracegirdle manuscript, the murder, the mugging, the conversation with Miri (although he knew about that already from her), meeting Miranda, her abduction, and the phone call.

  He listened more or less in silence and when I’d finished, he made a rotating motion with his hand and said, “And…?”

  “And what?”

  “Did you? With Miss Kellogg? No, don’t bother to lie, I can see it on your face.”

  “And this is the most important thing to you? That I fucked this woman? The murder, the kidnapping, that’s all irrelevant compared with where I stick my schlong?”

  “No, but where you stick your schlong seems to determine the course of your life, and messes up the lives of a number of people I love. Hence my interest.”

  “Oh, I thought that fucking was the only thing the church was interested in. Or were you not speaking ex cathedra?”

  “Yeah, you persist in thinking lust is your problem. Lust is not your problem, speaking ex cathedra, and in a dozen or so years it’ll have taken care of itself. It’s a miserable little sin after all. No, your problem is acedia and it always has been. The refusal to do necessary spiritual work. You always took on the responsibility for every bad thing that happened to our family, probably including World War II, all by yourself…”

  “You were in jail.”

  “Yes, but irrelevant. God wasn’t in jail but you didn’t ask for any help in that direction. No, you took it all on and failed, and you never forgave yourself, and so you think you’re beyond all forgiveness, and that gives you the license to hurt all the people who love you because after all, poor Jake Mishkin is so far outside the pale, so bereft of all hope of heaven, that anyone who loves him must be delusional and thus not worth considering. And why are you grinning at me, you turd? Because you’ve made me say the same thing I always say when you come up here and now you can forget it again, even tho
ugh you know it’s true. Sloth. The sin against hope. And you know it’s going to kill you someday.”

  “Just like Mutti? Do you really think so?” A high-pitched grinding sound came from the machine shop below, where they repaired bicycles. He waited until it stopped and said, “Yes, I do. As you know. Like the man said, God who made us without our help will not save us without our consent. Either you’ll cry mercy and forgive and be forgiven, or die the death.”

  “Yes, Father,” I said, looking piously upward.

  He sighed, tired of the pathetic old game I make him play. I was tired of it too but could not keep my clawed fingers away from the unendurable, unsalvable itch. He said, “Yes, you’ve manipulated me into preaching and you have therefore won yet again. Congratulations. Meanwhile, what are we going to do about this problem of yours?”

  “I don’t know. That’s why I came to see you.”

  “You think this Russian, Shvanov, is involved?”

  “As muscle, yes. But I can’t figure out who’s behind it.”

  “Why bother? The manuscript is gone, and this woman disappearing seems like a matter for the cops.”

  “I was told not to involve the cops. She said they’d kill her.”

  “And you feel it’s your responsibility to rescue her.”

  “I said I’d protect her and I didn’t; so, yes I do.”

  “You want to continue the affair. You’re in love.”

  “What the hell does that matter? She’s a human being in mortal danger.”

  He steepled his hands against his chin and gave me an uncomfortably penetrating stare, which is what he does now instead of kicking my ass. Then he said, “Well, of course I’ll help in any way I can. I have a couple of contacts down at Police Plaza. I’ll make some calls, get some background on this guy Shvanov, and also get the word out that this is serious-”