The Book of Air and Shadows

by Michael Gruber

  14

  Being armed, Crosetti found, felt a lot like having a broken zipper on your fly, something that made you feel self-conscious and somewhat stupid, and he wondered how his dad had been able to stand it during his entire working life. Or maybe it was different for cops. Or criminals. When he arrived at work, he was torn between leaving the thing in his bag (It might get stolen! Someone might find it!) and keeping it on his person. At first he left it in the briefcase but found that having done so, he was reluctant to leave the briefcase out of his line of sight, and after an uncomfortable hour or so he removed it and clipped it to his waistband, concealed under the cotton dust-jacket he wore in his basement workspace.

  Mr. Glaser had gone on an extended buying trip, and so Crosetti’s workload was rather light, except that he had to relieve Pamela, the non-Carolyn person, upstairs during her breaks. High-end rare books shops don’t get much walk-in business, even on Madison Avenue, and so Pamela spent most of her time on the phone with her friends, who were all top-of-the-line comedians to judge from the shrieks of fun that floated down the basement stairs, or cruising Craigslist for a better job, publishing, she had volunteered, unasked. Crosetti realized he was being something of an ass with her-it wouldn’t kill him to be a little friendlier-but he could not bring himself to generate an interest in a preppy girl who wanted to break into publishing.

  On one of the changings of the guard that day she asked him to reach down a book from an upper shelf and he did so and heard her make a small sound of alarm. When he handed her the book she asked, eyes wide, “Is that a gun on your belt? I saw it when you reached up…”

  “Yeah. It’s a dangerous business, books. You can’t be too careful. There’re people who’ll do anything for a Brontë first-anything.”

  “No, seriously!”

  “Seriously? I’m an international man of mystery.” A lame line, and he thought very briefly about saying he was just glad to see her, to see if she would pick up on the line from She Done Him Wrong and then he could ask her if she’d actually seen the film the line came from, that it was Mae West’s only Academy nomination and so on and so forth, his usual rap, but why bother? He shrugged, gave her a tight smile, handed her the book, and walked behind the counter.

  When she came back from her lunch she seemed less interested in being friendly than previously, seemed a little frightened of him in fact, which suited Crosetti very well. He spent the rest of the afternoon calling people he knew about places to stay, and trolled the Web sites with the same intent. After work, he went by the likeliest place he had found, a room in a loft near the Brooklyn Navy Yard occupied by a friend from college, a freelance sound engineer, and his girlfriend, a singer. The tenant list was rich in media wannabes and the friend said the Navy Yard was destined to be the next Williamsburg. The building stank of old toxins but was full of pale ocher light from the huge, filthy industrial windows and so reminded him painfully of Carolyn’s place. As he was a sucking-on-a-bad-tooth sort of fellow, this alone was enough to make the sale, and Crosetti walked down the splintery stairs eight hundred dollars poorer and with a date to move in after Thanksgiving. He then followed a difficult multiple bus route back to the A line and the train to 104th Street, Ozone Park.

  As he turned off Liberty Avenue onto 106th Street, where he lived, he passed a black SUV with tinted windows. It was not the kind of neighborhood that ran to new, shiny, $40K vehicles, and since he knew every car native to his street, and since Klim’s warning of the previous night instantly sprang to mind upon observing it, Crosetti was, if not exactly ready, not completely astounded by what happened next. As he hurried past it, he heard two car doors pop open and the sound of feet on pavement. He turned and saw two men in black leather coats moving toward him. Both were larger than he was and one was a whole lot larger. They had sweatshirt hoods drawn tight around their faces and their eyes were obscured by large dark glasses, which he thought was an indication of bad intent. Without much thought, Crosetti pulled out his father’s.38 and shot in the general direction of the larger man. The bullet went through this person’s leather jacket and shattered the windshield of the SUV. Both men stopped. Crosetti raised the pistol and pointed it at the head of the larger man. Both men backed up slowly and reentered their vehicle, which flew from the curb with screaming tires.

  Crosetti sat down on the curb and put his head down below his knees until the feeling of wanting to faint and to vomit passed. He stared at the pistol, as at an artifact of an alien civilization, and dropped it into his briefcase.

  “Albert! What happened?”

  Crosetti swiveled around and saw a small gray-haired woman in a pink tracksuit and a heavy pale blue cardigan standing just outside the front door of her bungalow.

  “It’s nothing, Mrs. Conti. Some guys tried to kidnap me and I shot one of them and they went away. It’s all over.”

  Pause. “You want me to call 911?”

  “No, thanks, Mrs. Conti. I’ll call it in myself.”

  “Madonna! This used to be a nice neighborhood,” said Mrs. Conti and returned to her kitchen.

  Crosetti picked himself up and walked on wobbly legs to his house. An elderly Cadillac hearse shone at the curb, and he regarded it sourly as he walked up the driveway to the back door. He wanted to slip through the kitchen, maybe pour himself a tumbler full of red wine and then up to his room for a nice rest, but no, Mary Peg was there twenty seconds after he had eased the door shut.

  “Allie! There you are. I’ve been trying to get you all day. Don’t you respond to messages anymore?”

  “Sorry, Ma, I was on the cell a lot.” He took a breath. “Actually, I was looking for dwellings. I think I found a place in Brooklyn, with Beck, you know, from school?”

  Mary Peg blinked, nodded, and said, “Well, it’s your life, dear. But the thing I wanted to talk to you about, Bulstrode’s lawyer called here.”

  “Bulstrode is dead,” he replied stupidly.

  “Yes, but dead people have lawyers too. It’s the estate.” She gave him a closer look. “Albert, is there something wrong with you?”

  Crosetti thought briefly of trying to conceal the events just transacted a block away but realized that Agnes Conti distributed information with a velocity that telecom engineers were still struggling to match, and would shortly be phoning to supply the details, real and imagined. He said, “Sit down, Ma.”

  They sat in the kitchen, Crosetti had his glass of wine and told his story. Mary Peg heard him out and thought she took it rather well. Actually, she thought, it put her in a somewhat better position than she would have been, given what she now had to relate to her son.

  “Ma! What did you do that for?” was Crosetti’s wail. “God! I hate when you pull stuff behind my back.”

  “Like stealing your father’s guns and turning my home into an armed camp?”

  “That’s not the same thing. It was an emergency,” said Crosetti without enthusiasm. He really wanted to lie down.

  “Well, I too thought that some action was required, and since you were unavailable and too busy running away from home, or whatever, to answer messages…”

  The sound of a car pulling up in front of the house stopped her short. “Oh, I bet that’s Donna,” said Mary Peg and went to the door. Crosetti poured another glass of wine. As Crosetti drained this, Radeslaw Klim came into the room, freshly shaved in a black uniform jacket and tie, and holding a shiny-peaked black cap.

  “Want some wine, Klim?”

  “Thank you, but no. I must drive shortly.”

  “It’s dark already. They don’t have funerals at night.”

  “No, it is not a real funeral. It is for vampires.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Yes, is quite à la mode now, you know, rich young people pretend to be vampires and ride in hearses, and have a party in crypt of a former church. Ah, here is your mother. And this must be the daughter. How do you do?”

  Donna Crosetti, or The Donna, as she was known in the family, was
a skinny red-haired clone of her mother and an ornament of the Legal Aid Society of New York, a friend of the downtrodden, or a bleeding heart who sprung hardened criminals to run wild in the streets, depending on whether you were talking to her mother or her sister, Patsy. She was the youngest daughter, just a year older than Crosetti himself, and had a more than full measure of the middle child’s sense of cosmic injury, the focus of which had been, from the earliest dawn of consciousness, the slightly younger brother, the Irish twin, the object of hatred and resentment, yet also the creature to be defended from all threats, to the last drop of blood. Crosetti felt exactly the same way and was just as inarticulate about it: a perfect stalemate of love.

  Klim introduced himself, shook hands with the rather startled Donna Crosetti, kissed Mary Peg formally on both cheeks, and took his leave.

  “Who was that?”

  “That’s the new live-in boyfriend,” said Crosetti.

  “What?” exclaimed The Donna, who had not been consulted.

  “Not,” said Mary Peg.

  “Is too,” said Crosetti. “He drives a hearse.”

  “At night?”

  “Yeah, he says it’s for vampires. How are you, Don?”

  “He’s not my live-in boyfriend,” said Mary Peg. “How could you say such a thing, Albert!”

  “He is too,” Crosetti insisted, feeling the years slip away in a manner that was unpleasantly quasi-psychotic and comforting at the same time. In a minute Donna would be screaming and chasing him around the kitchen table with a cooking implement in her little fist and their mother would be yelling and trying to stop them and dishing out random smacks and threatening apocalypse when their father got home.

  Donna Crosetti glared at her mother and brother. “No, really…”

  “Really,” said Mary Peg. “He’s a friend of Fanny’s who’s helping us decipher a seventeenth-century letter Allie found. He was working late on it so I offered him Patsy’s room for the night.”

  “Which was three nights ago,” said Crosetti. He wrapped his arms around himself and made kissing noises.

  “Oh, grow up!” said his sister. Crosetti stuck his tongue out at her, she rolled her eyes at him and sat down at the kitchen table. Removing a leather portfolio from her capacious bag, she flipped it open with a businesslike snap and said, “If this guy’s coming at eight, we don’t have much time. Let’s have it, from the beginning.” Crosetti looked at his mother. “I don’t understand why we have to do this,” he grumped.

  “Because you were cheated, and we’re here to see if you have a case against the estate, to make them pay you what the original was really worth, or get it back.”

  “I don’t want it back,” said Crosetti, getting sulky as the wine fumes rose from his empty stomach to his head. “I want none of this ever to have happened. That’s what I want.”

  “Well, my child,” said Mary Peg, “it’s a little too late for that. This has to be disentangled by a lawyer, and Donna is the lawyer in our family. And I’d think you’d appreciate her volunteering to help, especially since you just shot someone right outside our house-”

  “What!” said the family lawyer. “You shot someone? Did you call the-”

  “No, and I’m not going to. A couple of guys tried to kidnap me-”

  “What! Who?”

  “Donna, calm down,” he said, “you’re sounding like an Abbott and Costello act. You want the story or not?”

  Donna took a breath or two and seemed to snap her professional persona into place. It took nearly the whole hour to spin out the tale, what with her questions and the backtracking and prevarications by the little brother, so typical and so maddening, and the elaborate explanations of the ciphers and Klim’s role in the household, and the peculiar case of Carolyn Rolly. By the time Donna was satisfied, the little kitchen was uncomfortably warm and the level in the gallon jug of red wine had descended two inches or more.

  Donna riffled through her pages of notes and checked her watch. “Okay, let’s review a little before this guy gets here. First of all, you have no claim whatever on the Bulstrode estate for any purported swindle, because you had no right to sell that manuscript. Nor had your pal, Rolly. Both of you conspired to steal property rightly belonging to your employer. So the main thing I’m going to have to do is convince this Mishkin to forget the damn thing and go home. You really should’ve talked to me earlier.”

  “Nobody stole anything, Donna,” said her brother. “I explained this to you. Sidney told us to break the books and we broke the books. He got full value for the maps and plates and the rest was fully insured. It was just like a junked car. The junk man pays ten bucks for it and if he finds a CD under the front seat, he doesn’t have to give it back.”

  “Thank you, counselor. I see you went to a different law school than I did. Finders, keepers is only on the playground. If your junk man found a diamond ring in the wrecked car, do you think he could give it to his girlfriend?”

  “Why not?” asked Crosetti.

  “Because he had no reasonable expectation that the car would contain a diamond ring. If the legal owner happened to see the ring on the girlfriend he could sue for replevin and he’d win. When Glaser gave you those books he had no idea that they contained a manuscript worth serious money. When you found it your duty was to inform him of the increased value of his property, not convert it to your own use.”

  “So if I find a painting in a yard sale and I know it’s a Rembrandt and the seller doesn’t, I have to tell her? I can’t just give her ten bucks and sell it for ten million?”

  “A completely different situation. You’d be profiting from your superior knowledge, which is legit, and you would own the painting before you sold it. That, by the way, is what Bulstrode did to you. It’s sneaky, but perfectly legal. On the other hand, you never owned the books from which the manuscript emerged. Glaser did and does. In fact, I would suggest you contact him right now and tell him what’s going on.”

  “Oh, get out of here!”

  “Idiot child, focus on this! You stole an object worth between fifty and a hundred thousand dollars. In a few minutes, a guy is going to show up who thinks that value is part of an estate he holds in trust. What do you think he’s going to do, as an officer of the court, when we have to tell him that this valuable object actually belongs to someone else, and did when you sold it to his client?”

  “Listen to her, Albert,” said Mary Peg in a stern voice.

  Crosetti rose from the table and stalked out of the room, seething. At some rationalizing level of his mind he had convinced himself that the whole manuscript transaction was something of a prank, on the level of swiping a stop sign from a pole, for which he had been duly punished by Andrew Bulstrode’s scam. Morally, he had argued to himself, the thing was a wash. But now he was sitting with two of the three women in the world he most wished to impress (Rolly being AWOL), and they were agreed that he was a colossal jerk and a felon, and here all the family weight bore down: the disappointment, however veiled by kindness, that he was not the hero his father had been, that he was not an achiever like his sisters, that he especially was not a graduate of Princeton and Columbia Law School like Donna. He was woozy with wine besides and thought that he might as well go upstairs with his gun and shoot himself, that would save everyone a lot of trouble.

  But what he did instead, since he was in fact a decent young man from a loving family and not the tortured neurotic artist he sometimes imagined himself to be (as, briefly, now) was to pull out his cell phone and call Sidney Glaser in Los Angeles. He had Glaser’s cell phone number inscribed in his own device, of course, and Glaser answered on the third ring. An old-fashioned fellow, Sidney, but he made an exception for cell phones.

  “Albert! Is there anything wrong?”

  “No, the shop’s fine, Mr. G. Something’s come up and I’m sorry to trouble you, but I need an answer right away.”

  “Yes?”

  “Well, um, it’s sort of a long story. Can you talk?”


  “Oh, yes. I was about to go down to dinner but I can talk for a little while. What is it?”

  “Okay, this is in reference to the Churchill. The one that got ruined in the fire and you asked Carolyn to break it?”

  “Oh, yes? What of it?”

  “I was just wondering about the, ah, remainder. I mean the stripped books…”

  A pause here. “Have you had a call from GNY?”

  “No, it’s not really an insurance issue…”

  “Because, ah, what they paid out wasn’t nearly what we could have got at auction and so, ah…look, Albert, if they call, if they ever call, please refer them to me, understood? Don’t discuss the breaking of those books, or what Carolyn did, or anything with them. I mean the prints and maps, the decorator backs, these are really quite trivial matters and you know how these insurance people are…”

  “I’m sorry…decorator backs?”

  “Yes, Carolyn said she had a customer for the backs and could she burnish them up and deodorize and so forth and sell them and I conveyed them over to her. There should be a paper bill in the files. But the main thing is-”

  “Excuse me, Mr. G. When was this?”

  “Oh, that day, the day after the fire. She came upstairs and asked me if she could play with the carcasses, the leather and so on. Did you know she was an amateur bookbinder?”