The Book of Air and Shadows

by Michael Gruber

  Meanwhile, the very large one had rushed over and knocked the phone out of Mrs. Crosetti’s hand. He grabbed her around the neck, with his pistol pointed at her temple. He was shouting something, but his accent was so thick and he was so agitated that I, at least, could make nothing of it. The third man was just inside the living room door pointing his gun around and also shouting. When he saw that I had his pal’s gun he fired a shot at me, but his angle was blocked by the body of that same fellow. I now shifted this weapon into firing position, took a backward step, and turned to face the man who held Mrs. Crosetti.

  He was making a good deal of noise, desiring me to drop my gun or he would shoot her, and to make this threat more obvious, he pressed the barrel of his pistol hard against her head. This was another movie watcher repeating what he had learned on the screen, thus ignoring the obvious advantage of any firearm, which is that one can stand off from one’s victim and do damage while the unarmed victim cannot get at you. Mrs. Crosetti knew reality from fiction, however, and so shoved the man’s gun away from her head. It fired harmlessly into the ceiling, whereupon I shot him through the bridge of his nose at a range that could not have exceeded four feet.

  Then I was seized from behind by the human-club guy, but at that moment another shot sounded and the man let out a cry and slumped against me, for the third man had inadvertently shot his comrade, who had heroically attempted to grab me from behind and had thus moved into the line of fire. The wounded man screamed in a foreign language (probably Russian) and sat down on the coffee table, collapsing it, and as he opened the target I shot the third man twice in the chest. He dropped to the floor and poured blood.

  I would say that about forty-five seconds had elapsed since we heard that first shot. I have an image of myself standing there with the pistol in my hand while the thug from whom I had taken it slowly rose from the splinters of the coffee table. He was holding himself crooked, as if he had aged forty years in that short time. He looked me in the eye and backed away from me, shuffling. My ears were ringing from the shots, but it seemed that there was still gunfire coming from the street, and I wondered, rather abstractly, what was going on. I made no move to stop the man and when he saw my indifference he turned and dragged himself slowly from the room. No one attempted to stop him.

  All of that is remarkably clear and burned into my memory, and has formed the theme of many nightmares since: I awake sweating, imagining that I have killed two men, and then it hits me that it is not a dream, that I really have killed them. A uniquely unpleasant experience. It is actually quite difficult to kill someone with a handgun unless the bullet strikes and destroys the heart or the brain, or creates internal bleeding, for pistol bullets are not terribly powerful. A standard 9 mm round generates about 350 foot-pounds of energy at the muzzle, which is no fun if it hits you, but not absolutely devastating, which is why you get those situations where the cops shoot someone forty times. Cops are trained to keep shooting until the target is down, and occasionally it takes that much lead to do it. Rifle bullets are vastly more powerful, and this is why soldiers carry rifles. A 30.06 round hits with nearly three thousand foot-pounds, and yes I am avoiding the next part with this bumf, which I got from my brother during his glorious military career, because the memory is both horrible and vague in that bad-dream way where you imagine that it might even have been worse than you recall, a supposition supported in the aftermath when, from time to time, a mercifully forgotten detail will bob up out of the dark to appall you anew.

  So here I am standing amid the gun stink and the Crosetti children are gathered around their mother lifting her to her feet and placing her on the couch and she is absolutely covered in blood and tissue bits from the wounds of the guy whose brains I just blew out. I am looking down at the dead face of the third man: I only shot him twice but obviously I got lucky because he’s clearly dead, the eyes half-open, the face white and slack, the blood pool is huge, the size of a small trampoline. A good-looking guy, late twenties. Well, I don’t care to study him, nor the fellow with his brains spattered over Mrs. Crosetti’s end table, so I stroll over to the window and shift the blinds, and I see a gun battle going on, whose participants are a guy from the black SUV, a man shooting over the hood of a Cadillac hearse, whom I’ve never seen before, and Omar, shooting from behind the Lincoln. Somehow, I can’t get interested in this, it all seems so far away, and now I notice that my knees are shaking so badly that I literally can no longer stand up. I therefore fall into an easy chair. I hear sirens, although at first it is hard to distinguish these from the ringing in my ears. Now there is a transition that I can’t quite recall, although perhaps Mrs. Crosetti asked me how I was doing.

  Then, somehow, the room was full of shouting cops, the kind with submachine guns, helmets, and black uniforms, rather like the ones my granddaddy wore. (And how did American police come to dress like the SS, and how come no one objected to it? Or to the Nazi-style helmets our troops now wear? Where are the semioticians when we need them? All bitching about Shakespeare, probably.) Many of these submachine guns were pointed at me and I realized I was still holding the handgun on my lap, like a lady holds a purse at the opera.

  I was made to lie prone and I was cuffed, but I did not get arrested, since the person directing the invasion had been a colleague of the late Lieutenant Crosetti and was, therefore, inclined to listen to sense from Mrs. Crosetti, or Mary Peg, as she has since asked me to call her. We are all buddies now, it seems. Ms. Crosetti-Donna-has appointed herself defense lawyer for both me and Omar, and for a hearse driver named Klim, who is also a Polish cryptographer working on our ciphers, as I later learned. Paramedics arrived too and declared my victims dead and carried them off, leaving a truly remarkable amount of gelling blood behind. The police took statements at the scene. Each of the participants went singly into the kitchen and spoke to a pair of detectives, whose names I have forgotten, as I have forgotten the burden of what I told them. They seemed satisfied that I acted in self-defense; I got the impression that Mary Peg disposed of a good deal of authority in the NYPD. The only people arrested were the driver of the SUV and the wounded thug, who had been picked up wandering through the neighborhood some blocks away.

  Eventually the police left. They had two fall guys to blame all the gunfire on, and they could not see a way to arrest anyone else without involving the widow and son of a heroic cop. Mary Peg looked at the wreckage of her living room and began to wail and I joined her, quite disgracefully. Klim threw his arms around her and spoke softly in her ear, and Omar did the same for me. In retrospect, the story of the gunfight on the street is obvious. Omar was waiting in the Lincoln when the SUV zoomed up and the three armed men jumped out and ran into the house. Omar grabbed his gun and took off after them, but the driver shot at him, and Omar dived behind our car and returned fire. Then the hearse arrived and Klim joined the fray. Remarkably, none of the three was injured, which shows again how paltry is the handgun for any serious slaughter, except by accident or at extremely close range against the unarmed.

  Later, pizzas were ordered and we all sat around the kitchen table and ate them and drank red wine and congratulated ourselves on our survival. Donna Crosetti left, after advising her clients not to talk to the police, and Mary Peg and Albert Crosetti seemed to relax a little, and become somewhat more free in their conversation and their drinking. We had coffee made with generous slugs of Jameson whiskey. The events of the evening retreated a little, and I only burst into tears one additional time, although I was able to slip out to the bathroom before the spasm arrived. Post-traumatic stress is the current term for what you feel when you have killed another human, and it doesn’t really matter if it was justified or not, although murder is the national sport of many of the world’s nations, and thousands upon thousands of people seem to be able to do it without concern or remorse. I will probably never recover from it myself.

  Actually, that’s not true. You think you’ll never recover, but you do, or I did. Perhaps there is m
ore of Grandfather in me than I thought. Paul has apparently recovered from a much more extensive career as a killer, although he says he prays daily for the souls of the people he dispatched over in Asia. I don’t really know what this means, “pray for the souls.”

  At any rate I emerged from the john, and none of the party adverted to my red eyes. Klim was engaged in an argument with young Crosetti that I found intriguing, in which the Pole made the case that the only thing that would stop what now seemed to be escalating violence was to retrace the footsteps of Bulstrode and to find what he had found, if anything, and if anything, get hold of it. Once the Thing was in hand, of course, and public, there would be no question of anyone needing to commit further acts of violence. If there was Nothing, on the other hand, then we would need to convince the bad guys of this, a somewhat more difficult, but not impossible, task. The important thing was to up the tempo, so that we were not reacting defensively but in control of the game. As in chess.

  Crosetti was saying that no, the point was not to get any deeper into it, to stay close to home. If someone wanted the papers they could have them, he wanted nothing more to do with the whole thing. I felt sorry for the kid. I sympathized-I also wanted all of it not to have happened. But I also thought that Klim was right. As long as someone with no morals and access to armed men thought we had a lead on an Item that might be worth a hundred million bucks, then not one of us was safe. Klim thought he could watch over Mary Peg well enough for a short time, and the cops would keep an eye on the rest of the Crosettis, at least for a while, as well as turning up the heat on various Russian mobsters. But that was only a temporary solution, as he pointed out. The tale of the treasure would spread in the underworld, and before long, some other fiend would take a crack at it.

  Crosetti at last said, “Okay, let’s say I agree. What am I supposed to do? Wander around England indefinitely? With what for money?”

  “You have savings, don’t you?” asked Mary Peg.

  “Oh, right! I worked like a dog for that money. It’s for school and I’m damned if I’m going to blow it on some crazy idea.”

  “I could cash in some of the IRA,” she suggested.

  “What, and live on the pension? That’s nuts! You barely get by as it is.”

  “Money is not a problem,” I said, and they all looked at me as if I had declared the Earth flat. “No, seriously,” I said. “I’m loaded. And I would be glad to take Albert to England as my guest.”

  T HE S IXTH C IPHERED L ETTER (F RAGMENT 1)

  wherefore I should have anie favour of you? For I have gone against my Kinge but I sweare my Lord on anie thinge you shall name that I knew it not and was betrayed and made traitour by the wiles of my Lord Dunbarton as I have told.

  Now shall I relate how came it I was myself betrayed and so to throw myselfe upon yr. Lordship’s mercie. Twas in the winter now passed some days after Candelmas I thinke when I did spie Mr Piggott walking on Fenchurch Street. I made to greet him but he signed me privilie that I should not and he walketh on. Yet I was not to be uzed so for I had been many weekes without word from my Lord D. or indeed Mr Piggott and it vexed me sore that they should slight me thus as I had been to much trouble for theyre plottinges. I followed him and he turned him toward the river at St. Clements Lane and he enters a publicke house called The Lamb, a low dirty dark place and I found me a sweeper lad and gave him a tester and bade him go in and buy him ale and mete with it and sit him as near as he could by Mr Piggott, who I described as well as I could and come out & tell what he had heard and who the man met with if any & if he did well he should have another 6d.

  Soe wait I in shadowes under eaves & after a time out cometh the lad and he tells me my man met with Harry Crabbe and John Simpson & they spake low but he heard money passed in a purse. We wait in shadowes & soone out comes Mr Piggott & in a litel comes two ill-favoured men, one with his nose cut off & wore a leather one in its playce & the other a verie beare, black of face but trumperie dressed with a longe yellow plume to his hat. The lad pointeth now privilie, telling these be the men he met with. And what manner of men are these, I asked him, and he replies, Crabbe (he of the false nose) is well-named for he loveth the crabs so much he feedes them on men & this Simpson is called John the Baptist heerabouts, for he baptises in Thames water & better than a bischop too, for those he baptiseth sin no more in this world; by which he meant he drowneth them. Quoth I: did you then heere nothynge of theyre plots? He saith: yea, I heard that the playere must die & Simpson saith ten angels maketh but one angel & must give ten more if you want yon lad Richard in the river bye him & your man agreeth but with bad grace and giveth over more & may you my master, be generous as he. Soe I payde him and left that street much afeared & knowing not where to turn for aide.

  With my harte thus confuzed I got me over river to the Globe & set to my taskes there, but verie melancholie & otheres of that company saw & sence there be no company lyke a company of plaieres for gossip I was butt of verie much bayting that day, one saith hee is in love, another nay, he hath learnt he hath the pox, yet another nay, he hath lost all at cartes & shall pawn his cloake & hanger at the Jewes: til I threw a stool at Saml. Gilbourne, and soon thereafter Thos. Pope & I were at daggeres nearlie, when Mr Burbadge and some otheres bade us stop upon feare of ducking, yet we would not & were thrown in the river for oure owen goode.

  Then we had the tragedie of Hamlet that after-noone & I was set to plaie a lord attendant on the King & come out with them alle in Actus Primus, scena ii, but when I look out at the groundlings in the penny-places my harte near stopps in my breast for there at the fore stood those two villains from the Lamb & I sware I could not move more than a painted man on a board & missed my cue til Harry Cordell cloutes me in the short ribs to move me on.

  16

  Crosetti’s doubts about the rationality of the present voyage were somewhat assuaged by the thrill of traveling on a private jet. He had, of course, never ridden one before, nor had anyone he knew ever done so. He thought he could get used to it. Mishkin apparently never traveled any other way. He had a card from his firm entitling him to a certain number of hours of private jet flight and if you loaded enough people onto it, as now, it was only a little more expensive than first class, if you considered a couple of grand each a little, which Mishkin did. He had explained this to Crosetti on the ride out to Teterboro. He seemed to want Crosetti to believe he was just an ordinary guy and not an incredibly rich person. Yes, he was an income millionaire, but just barely. It was mainly that he did not really fit, physically, on commercial airliners. Otherwise, he’d be happy to line up and take off his shoes with his fellow citizens. Crosetti didn’t know why Mishkin was trying to sell him this line, but he’d noticed the same impulse in a couple of people he’d met through his film contacts, guys who’d sold scripts for six, seven figures and were bending over backward to demonstrate that they were still just regular fellas like everyone else: I only bought the Carrera for my bad back, it’s got the most orthopedically correct seating…

  The aircraft was a Gulfstream 100 and it was configured for eight passengers, and, somewhat to Crosetti’s surprise, they were carrying six: besides him and Mishkin, there was Mrs. Mishkin and the two Mishkin Munchkins (a phrase that popped into Crosetti’s mind when they arrived at the terminal and stuck there like a bit of bubble gum beneath a theater seat) and a guy who looked so much like Rutger Hauer that it was a little scary, and who turned out to be Paul, the brother of the host. Apparently, the wife and kids were going to be taken to Zurich after the stop in London, but the brother was going to come along on the Bulstrode mission.

  Crosetti thought this a little peculiar, but then he was getting the impression that Jake Mishkin was not all that tightly wrapped. For example, while they waited in the lounge provided at Teterboro for private jet passengers a man arrived who was apparently one of those people upon whom business empires utterly depended, for it seemed he could not be out of touch for one instant. That his underlings were a lazy
and recalcitrant lot was evidenced by his management style, which was loud-screaming nearly-and laced with obscenity. His interlocutors were told repeatedly to shut the fuck up and listen, and advised to tell other stupid motherfuckers to fuck themselves. Mrs. Mishkin was clearly upset by this person, as were the other inhabitants of the lounge. At last the churl finished his conversation with the command, “Tell that fuckhead to call me right away! This second!” He stared at the little instrument for almost a minute, mumbling curses, and then the thing rang again, with Wagner’s Valkyrie theme, and he resumed his tirade at the new fuckhead, whereupon Mishkin rose, walked over to the man, looming above him like the Jungfrau over Stechelberg. He said something in a low voice and was answered with a “Fuck off!” at which Mishkin plucked the cell phone from the man’s hand, snapped it in two, and tossed it in the trash. There was a pattering of applause from the other waiting passengers, Mishkin walked back to their group, and, after a stunned interval, Mr. Obnoxio dashed out of the lounge, perhaps to obtain another phone or a cop, but which it was they never discovered, because at that moment a trim young woman in a tan uniform came out of a door and informed Mishkin that they could board now.

  Crosetti was the last one to enter the airplane and took the remaining seat, which was leather smooth as girls and comfortable enough to qualify as a mortal sin all by itself. The uniformed woman asked him if he wanted something to drink and of course he asked for champagne and got it, a split of Krug, perfectly chilled, and a crystal flute to drink it from and a basket of little crackers and a ceramic tub of soft cheese. The man across the aisle was having a beer, but he had a little basket too. This was the brother. Crosetti examined him peripherally as the plane rolled across the taxiways. He was wearing a dark sweater and blue jeans and wore cheap sneakers on his feet. The poor relation? He was reading the morning’s New York Times, scanning it really, as if the news bored him, or he knew what it was going to say already. Crosetti appreciated the feeling; this was how he himself read the paper, except for the movie reviews. He wondered if the man were an actor, a terrific-looking guy really, and wondered too at the genetics that had cranked out this one and Mishkin from the same batch.