The Book of Air and Shadows

by Michael Gruber

  “No, don’t do that! Don’t involve the cops at all. You have other kinds of contacts.”

  “I do. All right, I’ll see what the street has to say.”

  “Thank you. The main thing I’m worried about is Amalie and the kids. If they want to put more pressure on me…”

  “I’ll take care of that too,” he replied, after a brief considerate pause. This, of course, is what I had come for. Paul knows a lot of tough kids, what they call original gangsters, in that neighborhood, and he has an odd relationship with them. He thinks they’re exactly like the Germanic or Slavic barbarians that the missionaries who were sent out in the dark centuries met and converted-proud, violent, hungry for they know not what. In the early days of the mission Paul had to literally fight people on the street to demonstrate that he was tougher than they were, which he was. That he had a rep, that he was known to have stabbed people in prison, didn’t hurt. That he had personally killed more people than all of them put together, and looked it, was another plus.

  Also, Paul claimed that compared with the montagnards, New York gangbangers weren’t very tough. None of them had ever missed a meal and if imprisoned had been housed in what would have seemed luxurious spas to the average Hmong. He said his guys over there could have eaten all the Crips, Bloods, and Gangster Disciples for breakfast. And their pathetic bravado inspired compassion in him rather than the terror common among the better classes. (Paul is not afraid of anything mortal, nor was he at ten.) But he took them seriously as tribes, and like the Jesuits of old he targeted their leaders, the most violent of the violent, and over time had come to a concordat of sorts with them, which was that there was to be no dope sold and no whores run within a certain pale around Paul’s buildings, and that people fleeing the vengeance of the street could find sanctuary within. Some few of the street lords have actually been converted. A larger number sent their children or their younger brothers and sisters to be educated at his school. It was a very Dark Ages arrangement and perfectly natural to a man like my brother.

  Now I could see that Paul, having made his decision to help, couldn’t wait to get me out of there. Not a comfortable man, my brother, sort of like Jesus in Matthew, always at the run, impatient with the apostles, conscious of the shortness of the time, the need to get the successors up and ready for when the founder must leave the scene. He just turned away and started talking to some boys, and so I collected Omar and made my grateful exit.

  In the car we headed west and south until the Columbia campus hove into view. I generally have a pretty good idea of Mickey Haas’s schedule and so I knew that Thursdays he held office hours all morning. I called him and he was in and yes he’d be glad to have lunch with me, at the faculty club for a change. I have always found the dining room on the fourth floor of Faculty House at Columbia one of the more pleasant places to lunch in New York: a beautifully proportioned airy chamber, with one of the best views of the city from its high windows, and a perfectly adequate prix fixe buffet, but Mickey prefers our usual Sorrentino’s. I think it’s because he likes to get somewhat drunk at our lunches and prefers to do this out of sight of his peers. Perhaps he also enjoys having my limo sent for him.

  Just before we reached the club, my cell rang and it was my sister.

  “You were right,” she said. “Osip would really like to meet you.”

  “That was fast,” I said. “He must owe you a favor.”

  “Osip doesn’t owe favors, Jake, he collects them. As a matter of fact, he called me and asked me to set it up. That’s not a good sign.”

  “I’m sure it’ll be fine,” said I, not at all sure. “Where and when?”

  “Do you know Rasputin’s? On Lafayette?”

  “You have to be kidding. That’s like meeting John Gotti in a Godfather’s Pizza place.”

  “What can I say? Osip has a sense of humor. Anyway, he says he’ll be there after ten tomorrow tonight. I would say ‘be careful,’ if it weren’t too banal for words. But you will be careful, won’t you? If not, I assume you’ll want to rest beside Mutti in Green-Wood. I’ll send the most vulgar wreath imaginable.”

  I recall that Mickey and I had the roast beef and shared a bottle of Melville cabernet, so appropriate, he joked, for a professor of English. Mickey was actually in a pretty good mood, and I asked him if his financial position had improved at all and he said it had: here followed a blizzard of information about hedge funds and REITs and commodities trading that went in one ear and out the other. Sensing my disinterest, he politely changed the subject and asked me what was new with me. In answer, I drew out the copy of Bracegirdle’s letter I had picked up from Ms. M. that morning and slid it across the table. “Only this,” I said.

  “This is it? The Bulstrode thing? Good God!” Naturally he could read the Jacobean scrawl as easily as you read Times New Roman, and he began to do so at once, rapt, and ignored the waiter when he came to ask about dessert, a unique occurrence in my experience. Twenty or so minutes passed as he turned the pages, occasionally making a quiet exclamation-“Holy shit!”-and similar while I drank coffee and gazed at the diners and played eye games with an attractive brunette at another table. My inner theater was showing what it usually did after a meeting with my brother: a thoroughgoing denigration of him and his works, who did he think he was playing the great blue-eyed white god descending upon the ghetto unasked to bring salvation to the darkies! It was absurd, nearly obscene, nearly Nazi in its colossal arrogance. The sad pleasure of this shadow play ceased only when Mickey beside me said “Wow!” loud enough to draw the attention of the brunette and several others.

  He pounded the papers with a stubby digit. “Do you realize what this is?”

  “Sort of. Miranda read it and explained its value, although I’m sure I don’t have a scholar’s sense of it.”

  “Miranda Kellogg? She’s seen this?” He seemed a little upset.

  “Well, yes. She’s the legal owner of the original.”

  “But you have custody of it at present?”

  So I related the events of the past twenty-four hours. He was stunned. “That’s terrible,” he said. “Absolutely catastrophic!”

  “Yes, I’m extremely concerned about her.”

  “No, I meant the manuscript, the original,” he said, with a callousness worthy of a lawyer. “Without that, this is valueless,” he added, tapping the pile of copy paper again. “My God, we have to get it back! Do you have any idea what’s at stake?”

  “People are always asking me that, and my answer is ‘not really.’ Ammunition in some literary squabble?” My tone was cold but he ignored it, for this was a new Mickey, no more the laid-back gentleman-scholar, amusingly contemptuous of how his confreres struggled to climb the greasy poles of academe. He had the fire in his eye. The new Mickey expatiated upon the colossal academic value of Mr. B.’s screed; I listened, as to someone describing the details of a complex and tedious surgical procedure.

  At length I put in, “So it’s a big deal if Shakespeare was a Catholic?”

  “It’s a big deal if Shakespeare was anything. I already went through this with you. We know almost nothing about the interior life of the greatest writer in the history of the human race. Look…just one example of thousands, and bears on the matter at hand. A woman has recently written a book, she’s an amateur scholar, but she’s certainly done her research, and in this book she claims that nearly the whole corpus of Shakespeare’s work, in particular the plays, is an elaborate coded apology for Catholicism and a plea to the monarch of the day for relief of the disabilities that Catholics then suffered. I mean she gives literally hundreds of heterodox readings arguing this theory in reference to all the plays, and she also proposes the protective hand of powerful contemporary Catholic peers to explain why Shakespeare wasn’t called to account for writing this easily readable code for the public stage. I mean it’s a complete and original picture explaining nearly all of Shakespeare’s work. How about that?”

  I shrugged and asked, “So-i
s she right?”

  “I don’t know! Nobody knows!” This a semishout, provoking more looks from the peers. I could now see why Mickey might hesitate to dine here. “That’s the fucking point, Jake! She could be right. Or someone could write a book demonstrating through just as thorough an analysis of the same plays that Shakespeare was gay, a good Protestant faggot. Or a monarchist. Or a lefty. Or a woman. Or the Earl of Oxford. That’s the basic, intractable problem with all Shakespeare studies that bear on intent or biography, and now this!” Tap tap tap. “If genuine…I say if genuine, it will be the greatest single event in Shakespeare studies since…I don’t know, since forever. Since the field was born as a rational entity in the eighteenth century.”

  “This letter does that?”

  “Not as such. It’s just the first taste, the first tiny opening taste of paradise. But Jake”-he lowered his voice and moved his mouth closer to my ear in a near parody of a man seeking confidentiality-“Jake, if this guy spied on William Shakespeare, if he wrote down reports, if he described Shakespeare’s life the way he described his own miserable life…oh, Jesus, that would be something real. Not just speculation based on the use of images in the second act of King fucking Lear, but actual data. Who he saw, what he said, his ordinary speech, what he believed, what he ate and drank, was he a big tipper, how long was his dick…Jake, you have no fucking idea.”

  “Well, I have some idea what that manuscript play would be worth.” He rolled his eyes and made a show of fanning his face. “Oh, that. We are not going to even think about that. No, I will be creaming in my panties if we can even get hold of those ciphered letters he mentions. No wonder old Bulstrode was playing it so close, the poor bastard. Not to speak ill of the dead, but you might’ve thought that after all I did for him he would’ve given me a little peek when this fell into his hands.”

  “It must’ve driven him crazy. He didn’t say anything to his niece either.”

  “Yes. Poor woman. You don’t have any idea where these spy letters could be?”

  “I don’t, but what I want to know now, and maybe you can help me here, is why a Russian gangster is interested in them enough to commit a federal crime. He’s probably not in the Modern Language Association.”

  “An organization brimful of gangsters and worse,” said Mickey, smiling. “But I take your point.” He paused, and a peculiar dreamy expression came over his face for just an instant, as if he had just inhaled a mouthful of opium, eyes partly closed, as if contemplating a paradise just out of reach. He came back, however, with an almost audible snap and said,

  “Unless…”

  I knew just what he meant. “Yeah, unless Bulstrode discovered something on his trip to England that established the existence of the…Item. The Item, let’s say, really exists, and these guys, or someone hiring these guys, knows about it and wants it. But it turns out that the ciphered letters are part of the trail that leads to it. Do we even know if they were with this letter?”

  “You’re asking me?”

  “Well, yeah. You know more about all this stuff than anyone else but Bulstrode himself and possibly Miranda, both of whom are currently out of reach. Obviously, someone offered Bulstrode a manuscript. What if there were others in the bundle, and he declined to buy them?”

  “Impossible! He would’ve sold both his grandmothers for a package like that.”

  “Yes, but absent a bull market in grandmothers, how much would he have had to offer, say for just the Bracegirdle original?”

  “I don’t know…fifty grand, maybe, if the seller wanted instant cash. At auction, God knows what it would have fetched. Maybe twice that, three times…”

  “And did Bulstrode have that kind of cash?”

  “Hell, no. He was skinned by the lawyers over that phony Hamlet business. I had to advance him money on his salary when he came over here. Wait a minute…!”

  “Yeah, right. If he didn’t have serious money, how did he get hold of the manuscript? Two possibilities. Either he paid a far lower price to an owner who didn’t know what it was, in which case, when the seller was conned into thinking that the Bracegirdle wasn’t worth that much, and if he had the ciphers, he didn’t offer them to Bulstrode at all. Or, Bulstrode sees the whole package and the seller knows the real value and he wants major bucks for it. So why doesn’t Bulstrode go to the Folger? Or to his good pal Dr. Haas for that matter?”

  A bitter laugh here. “Because he knew I was broke too?”

  “Did he? But let’s say it was because the provenance is shaky. The seller is something of a crook himself, but he knows the value of these letters as a key to something even more gigantic. So Bulstrode goes to Mr. Big and sells him on a deal-help me buy the package and we’ll find the most valuable item on earth and-”

  “That’s ridiculous! I mean, sure, Andrew could have lowballed a naive seller, but he couldn’t possibly have known any Mr. Bigs. He hardly knew anyone in New York.”

  I thought about this and agreed that Mickey was probably right. Miranda had said much the same thing. I thought for a while and said, “Then there has to be a tertium quid.”

  “You mean someone who knew the value of what Bulstrode had and also knew gangsters? And wanted the big payoff. Are there people like that?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I’m a person like that. I know a distinguished professor of English literature, you, and I also know some hard boys. It’s probably not as uncommon as we’d like to believe. Stockbroker types never seem to have trouble finding a thug to knock off their wives. Or vice versa. In any case, Bulstrode may have gone to this person and confided that he had the Item within reach. This person, for whatever reason, lets the hard boys know about it. Bulstrode goes to England and comes back. He knows he’s being followed, so he stashes the package with me. Then the gangsters grab him and torture him enough to get my name out of him, which is why I’m in their sights and why Miranda was taken, and why they want to get their hands on the ciphers.”

  “Which neither she nor you have, since Bulstrode didn’t. Do we know they even exist?”

  “Mr. Tertium obviously does. Tell me, did Bulstrode ever mention to you the name of the person who sold him the manuscript?”

  “Never. Christ! Why didn’t he come to me? It would’ve been the easiest thing in the world to arrange a purchase at any reasonable price.”

  Here I told him what Miranda had related to me about Bulstrode’s shame over the fake Hamlet affair and the extent of his paranoia. Mickey shook his head. “That poor ass! God, he’d be alive now if he had. But, you know, it shouldn’t be all that hard to learn the name of the seller. Andrew had an appointment diary. Or he could’ve given the seller a check. The trouble is that his diary and checkbook are still being held by the cops.”

  “Yes. But there may be ways around that. It occurs to me that I’m the lawyer for the Bulstrode estate and the lawyer for its heiress. I’ll see whether the cops will let me examine that material.”

  And so on and so on. I’m fairly sure that’s where the idea of checking on who sold the papers came up. After I left Mickey, I received a call on my cell phone from Detective Murray returning mine of the previous night. He had, of course, heard about the break-in, theft, and abduction and wanted to talk to me. I concocted a story for him. There had been no abduction, I said. Ms. Kellogg had called me and said she was fine, that she had left the apartment before the assault, that she had the papers in her possession. They were her property, technically, and there was really no reason for us to get alarmed because a grown woman had decided to take a hike. He said that was a good attitude because there was clearly no connection at all between the brouhaha around my old papers and the death of Andrew Bulstrode, the investigation of which was closed as of today. He’d been killed by a nineteen-year-old homosexual prostitute named Chico Garza, who was in police custody and had made a full confession, and it was just as they’d thought, a sexual game gone sour. The boy had been caught trying to use Bulstrode’s Visa card. So he had been right, I agr
eed, using a relieved tone. A street mugging, an attempted burglary and assault, a missing woman: all coincidences. I apologized for doubting him, and he graciously replied that citizens, taught by the plots of thrillers, usually tried to complexify things, while real crimes were typically stupid and simple, as here. Happens all the time.

  I agreed that it probably did and presumed that, since the investigation was completed, there would be no objection to me, as the lawyer in the case, looking into some of his papers on estate business? No objection at all, he said.

  T HE S ECOND C IPHERED L ETTER

  My Lord, be assured I am well rebuked by your cypher of 16th Jany & will endeavour to pleaze you better hereafter by writing briefer: for as I am but recently come to this intelligenceing I know not what to put and what is dross & unworthy of yr. worshipes regard. Oure strategem proceedeth thus: upon the Princesse Elizabeth her name-daye as you foretold, there was projected celebratioun & feastinge at White-Hall & we are commanded to playe Much Ado abt. Nothinge & some masques of Mr. Johnson. Since the tyme that last I wrote I have become of the company, not a clerke of the bookes onlie but also as indeed all the otheres are too a factotum: I lift & carry, paint & build & beyond these mechanickal labours I also serve to swell a scene, as soldier, attendant-lord, &c. with trumperie robes, basinnets, tinne swords, &c. at perill of my sowle I think, but God will comprehend it and forgive, for I doe not give speche upon the stage. In these weekes I am much with W.S., for he favours me & keepes me at his howse by Black-Friers. On the daye afore-mentioned I am to be of the Watch & also Lord Attendant to Don Pedro; but verie neare the houre of performance oure Mr. Ussher falls from the stage by mischance & can not stand & soe I must play the Boy as well, that is a speakeing parte, but two lines, & I sware I would rather face the tercio of Seville in full battel than speke before an audience & this a royal one too; but I did wel enow though I quaked.