T ap.
Crosetti stirred in his sleep and tried to return to a rather nice dream in which he was sitting around a movie set with Jodie Foster and Clark Gable, just having a comfortable conversation about the movies, and he was giving Jodie the eye because they were in on the secret about Gable not really being dead and waiting for him to explain about how he’d fooled the world but there was this rattling sound behind them and he said he’d go find out what it was…
Tap tap tap taptaptaptap
He was up, in the unfamiliar room of the Linton Lodge Hotel, on the outskirts of Oxford, a very nice room that Professor March had kindly arranged for him. It had a triple bay window giving on the garden, these windows being black with the night and also the source of the noise that had separated him from dreamland. Another rattle of pebbles hit the glass. He checked his watch: two-thirty in the morning.
Rising, he pulled on his jeans, went to the window, opened it, and got a faceful of gravel. He cursed and leaned out the window and spied a dark figure on the lawn below, stooping to retrieve another handful of pebbles from the path.
“Who the hell is that?” he demanded in the sort of loud whisper one uses when not wanting to wake a sleeping house.
The person below stood and announced in the same style, “It’s Carolyn.”
“Carolyn Rolly?”
“No, Crosetti, some other Carolyn. Get down here and let me in!”
He stared below at the white, raised, familiar face for a long moment and then shut the window, pulled on a shirt and sneakers, left the room, ran back and got his key just before the door swung shut, dashed through the short hallway, flew down the stairs and through the lounge to the garden door. He opened it, and there she was, in a long-sleeved black T-shirt and jeans, soaked through, her dark hair plastered in strings on either side of her face.
She pushed past him into the lounge.
“Christ, I’m freezing,” she said, and she seemed to be: in the dim red light of the emergency exit lamp her lips looked dark blue. She glanced at the bar. “Can you get me a drink?”
“This is closed and locked up. But I have a bottle in my room.”
He did too, a fifth of Balvenie purchased in the duty-free for his mother. When they were in the room, he turned on the hot water in the bath, handed her his old plaid bathrobe, and told her to take her wet clothes off. He poured a couple of generous shots into the hotel water glasses while she changed in the bathroom, and when she emerged, in the robe with a towel around her hair, handed her one of them.
She gulped it down, coughed, and sighed, while he stared at her face. She met his eye. “What?” she said.
“What? Carolyn, it’s the second of December, no, the third now, and you’ve been missing since, I don’t know, the end of August. Bulstrode is dead, did you know that? Someone killed him. And his lawyer shot two guys in my mom’s living room and gangsters tried to kidnap me and…oh, Christ, I can’t begin to…Carolyn, where the hell have you been and what the hell have you been up to?”
“Don’t yell at me!” she said in a strained voice. “Please, can I just sit down and be quiet for a minute?”
He gestured to an armchair by the window and she sat on this and he sat on the bed facing her. She looked ridiculously small and young now, although there were smudges under her eyes and their blue seemed dulled, like tarnished metal.
She finished her whiskey in silence and held out her glass for a refill.
“No,” said Crosetti. “The story first.”
“From what point? My birth?”
“No, you can start with your marriage to H. Olerud of 161 Tower Road, Braddock, Pee-Ay.”
A sharp intake of breath and he saw those familiar bars of rose bloom on her cheekbones. Rolly had less control of the blush than he would have supposed necessary for such an accomplished liar.
“You know about that?” she asked.
“Yeah. I actually went out there, to the house. I had a nice conversation with Emmett.”
At this her eyes widened and she clutched her mouth. “Oh, God, you saw him? How is he?”
“Reasonably healthy, a little skinny maybe. He seems like a bright kid. I saw the girl too, also healthy, the bit I saw of her. Their father seems like a pretty violent guy.”
“You could say that. Harlan is fairly free with his hands.”
“I saw. How did you come to hook up with him? He seems a lot older than you.”
“He was my brother-in-law. My mom died when I was thirteen, and my sister Emily took me in. She was four years older than me and he was six years older than her.”
“What about your father?”
She uttered a short derisive laugh. “Whoever he was. Mom was a small-town waitress and barmaid and she supplemented her income by cultivating guys. Pay the rent this month and you get all the ass you can handle. She was what they call a trucker’s friend. One of them shot her and the guy she was with at the time. I guess he thought it was true romance. I came home from middle school one day and the cops were there and I called Emily and she picked me up. This was in Mechanicsburg, and I started to live with them. Do you need to hear this?”
“Yes. So there was no Uncle Lloyd.”
“No, I lied about that. There was Harlan, though. He started messing with me when I turned fourteen and Emily didn’t do anything to stop it, he had her beat down so bad. I got pregnant with Emmett when I was sixteen and with Molly four years later and what can I say about it but that was the way I thought things were. Harlan had a job at the battery plant, there was food on the table, and that’s how we lived. I had Emily and she had me and we both had the kids. You’d be surprised how many people there are in places like Braddock who live like that. Then Harlan lost his job and had to take a shit job in a Wal-Mart warehouse and Emily died and-”
“How did Emily die?”
“She got electrocuted by the washing machine. It was always kind of sparky, and Harlan was always promising to fix it but he never did, and we had to be careful around it. I sort of think she accidentally on purpose killed herself. He was beating her pretty regular by then.”
“Uh-huh. And how does the bookbinding come into this?”
Suddenly her face turned rigid. “You want to know my whole life story? Why do you? Because we had a fuck? That entitles you to the whole fucking five-CD collection of the life of Carolyn Rolly?”
“No, Carolyn,” said Crosetti. “I’m not entitled to anything. But you came to me, in the middle of the night. Why? A warm bath? A drink of scotch? A chat about old times in the bookstore?”
“No, but…look I need your help. I ran away from them. I didn’t know where else to go. And we don’t have the time to get into every detail. When they wake up and find I’m gone they’ll come here.”
“Who’s ‘they,’ Carolyn?”
“Shvanov’s people. There are four of them, in a hotel about two miles from here. They know where you are. That’s how I knew to come here.”
“And now…what? We’re on the same side again? Why should I believe anything you say?”
“Oh, God! I told you before, I don’t know how to behave with…real people like you. I lie, I get into desperate panics and I run and…Christ, can’t you give me another drink? Please?”
He did. She drank. “Okay, look we don’t have time for the long version. Bookbinding-I took the kids to a doctor one day, for shots for school, and while I was waiting in the office…I saw this book. It was part of the decorations, you know? How some people have fancy bookcases with old hardcover books in them? Well, this doctor had one of those and Emmett and Molly were playing with them, taking the books down and using them like blocks and the receptionist told them they had to stop and I replaced them on the shelf and there was one of them that was called The Bookbinder’s Art and I swiped it. It was bound in half-calf with gold tooling. I don’t know why I took it. Maybe it was, it felt so rich, the feel of the leather and the paper, it was so not Braddock, like a piece of a different world that fell there by accident
, right there in my hand, like a jewel. And when I got home I hid it and read it at night, every night, for months, and the idea that people could just make books by hand and they would be beautiful things…I don’t know why but it just got under my skin. And then Emily died and he started beating on me and I knew if I didn’t get out I’d be as dead as Emily, either he’d do it or I would, or I’d kill him. So I left. The first time, he caught me and locked me in the cellar and beat me so bad I could hardly walk. The next time I waited for his payday and I took five hundred in cash while he was sleeping and walked away and hitched a ride and ended up in New York and stayed in a shelter. I got a job cleaning buildings at night. I found my loft through that job. It was illegal and toxic, like I told you, but it was dirt cheap because the owner wanted someone on the property so scavenger gangs wouldn’t rip out the copper. That was the first time I heard Shvanov’s name.”
“Why?”
“Because he owned the building, or part of it. Able Real Estate Management. Okay, so I had a place to stay and I was a cleaner for over two years, working nights, spending all my spare time in the library reading about bookbinding and about the book business and learning what I had to know to fake a résumé. Then I quit the cleaners and got a job in a midtown restaurant waiting tables because I needed to look at regular people, see how they dressed, how they talked, the gestures. I converted myself to a middle-class person. That took the better part of another year. And then I got the job with Glaser. My sad story. Now, do you want to hear about the manuscript?”
“I do.”
“I knew Bulstrode from before-I think I told you that in New York. Sidney introduced us, and I took a course he gave on manuscripts at Columbia General Studies. As soon as I saw the pages I took out of the Churchill I knew it was a big find.” She sipped at her drink and looked out the window at the black night. “And you want to know why I lied about owning the carcasses, why I pretended it was nothing much, and why I lied about being a fugitive so that you’d sell the pages to Bulstrode for spare change.”
“I’m all ears.”
“Okay, I’m a bookstore clerk who found a manuscript in what’s supposedly a back I bought for pennies from my employer. I have no resources and it’s going to take significant resources to get the thing authenticated and sold at auction and as soon as I go public with it Sidney is going to come out swinging and-”
“What do you mean, swinging?”
“Oh, I see you don’t know Sidney. He’s going to say that I opened the covers and found this manuscript and then swindled him into selling me the books as backs. So there’s immediately a cloud on the title and no auction house will touch it. Sidney’s a big gun in that world and I’m nobody. So I needed a front man and I thought of Bulstrode. I called him while you were waiting in the street that morning, told him what we’d found, and set up what went down in his office. He said that if it was genuine he’d give me five grand for it over and above what he gave you. So then it was Bulstrode’s manuscript. Even if he’d been fooled once, he’s still a major scholar and paleographer with access to tons of manuscript sources. There wouldn’t ever have to be a connection with me or Glaser.”
“Right, but Carolyn, I still don’t get why you didn’t tell me this off the bat.”
“Oh, for God’s sake-I didn’t know you. You could have mentioned it to Glaser the next day-hey, Carolyn found a priceless Jacobean manuscript in those books you sold her for junk, ha-ha. So I had to pretend to involve you in the scam without at the same time letting you know what the manuscript really was.”
“I see. And what happened afterward, that night-that was part of the scam too?”
For almost the first time that evening she looked him right in the face. Crosetti’s father had once told him that pathological liars always looked the interrogator right in the eye and kept the stare for longer than was natural, and he was happy to see that Carolyn did not do this. Her look was tentative and, he imagined, a little ashamed.
“No,” she said, “that wasn’t part of the plan. I knew you were pissed off at me, and I’d told you that porker about Uncle Lloyd and I thought you’d just walk away, and when you didn’t and you did all those nice things…look, in my whole life I never had a single other day like that, someone taking me places, that beautiful music, and buying me things, just because they cared about me as a person and not just because they wanted to paw me…”
“I did want to paw you.”
“I meant someone I wanted to get pawed by, someone my age, someone sweet. I was never a kid, never a teenager. I never hung out at the drive-in with boys. I mean, it was like drugs.”
“So, you like me?”
“Oh, I adore you,” she said, in a tone so matter-of-fact that it was more convincing than any sighing avowal. His heart actually gave a little thump. “But so what? You’re so much too good for me that it’s ridiculous, and that doesn’t even count my kids, you really need to get saddled with that mess, and so I figured, okay, just one night of…I don’t know, what you said, one night of youth, the kind of things regular people do when they’re our age and after that it was like the end of Cinderella, except there was no glass slipper and no prince. The next day I got together with Bulstrode to plan out what to do next, and he said he had a source for the money he needed and we went to meet Shvanov. Did you ever see Osip Shvanov?”
“No. Only people who work for him.”
“Oh, he’s something rare. Very smooth, except around the eyes. He reminded me of Earl Ray Bridger.”
“I’m sorry…?”
“A felon my mom once went out with for a while, who I don’t want to talk about right now. Anyway, I spotted him for a bad guy right away, but poor Bulstrode didn’t have a clue, and for sure I wasn’t going to tip him off. He did his little pitch about the Shakespeare play to Shvanov. He said the Bracegirdle document itself was worth fifty to a hundred grand, but if we found the Shakespeare manuscript, there was no way to calculate how high the price would go. A hundred million? A hundred fifty? And Shvanov would risk nothing because even if we came up empty on that, he’d still have the Bracegirdle to sell. Anyway, Shvanov gave him twenty large and told him to take off for England immediately to research Bracegirdle and Lord Dumbarton and get on the trail of the play. Which he did. And I went with him-”
“Without a good-bye. Don’t you think that was a little harsh?”
“That was the best thing about it, knowing you weren’t ever going to be involved with that son of a bitch.”
“You were protecting me?”
“I thought I was,” she admitted, and then added defensively, “and don’t think you didn’t need it. You don’t know this guy.”
“Speaking of whom-how did a Brit scholar happen to know a thug like Shvanov anyway?”
“I have no idea. A mutual friend hooked them up. I thought it was some loan shark deal-Bulstrode was stony broke and maybe he tried to raise money on the street for this thing and it led him up the chain. God, I’m so tired! Where was I?”
“Leaving on a jet plane, don’t know when you’ll be back again. And no good-byes.”
“Right. Okay, we get to England and go straight to Oxford and we stay with Ollie March. Bulstrode said I had to stay with them, which March didn’t much like, but he said it was for security. I had to get the manuscript dated, so no one would know Bulstrode was involved, and when the dating came back positive, that’s when he really got squirrelly. I wasn’t allowed to make phone calls, and the only reason I got to write that letter to Sidney was I convinced him that it would be more suspicious not to write and make up a story about the plates and send him a check. He was insanely suspicious of me, that I was, like, working for Shvanov and telling him what we were up to, our research and all.”
“But you weren’t.”
“But I was. Of course I was working for Shvanov. I’m still working for Shvanov, as far as Shvanov knows. He gave me a cell phone before I left New York and told me to keep in touch. What was I supposed to say
to a man like that? No?”
Crosetti was silent under her defiant look. She snatched the towel from her head and dried her hair so violently that he winced. After a moment, he asked her, “What did Bulstrode say when you told him about the ciphered letters?”
Here she blushed again. “I didn’t tell him. Shvanov did.”
“But you told Shvanov.”
“I confirmed his suspicions,” she admitted quickly. “He knows things, Crosetti. He has people everywhere. Obviously he knew about you from Bulstrode, and he must have checked around. You don’t think he can find out what’s happening at the New York Public Library? He can find out what’s happening in the CIA, for Christ’s sake!”
“So much for keeping me out of it,” he said.
“I’m sorry. I’m a coward and he scares me. I can’t lie to him. Anyway, when Bulstrode got the news about the ciphers, he went ballistic. I had to practically sit on him to calm him down. He realized that the ciphers were the key to finding the play manuscript and if Shvanov got hold of them from you, then he wouldn’t need us anymore, which was probably not that good for our health. I said we should try to see if the fair copies of the ciphers Bracegirdle sent to Dunbarton were still in existence at the receiving end.”
“That’s why you went to Darden Hall.”
“Right. But they weren’t there, or anyway we didn’t find them. We did find a Breeches Bible, though. Do you know what that is?”
“Yeah,” said Crosetti, “a small Tudor Bible, 1560, nine by seven. We think it was the basis of the Bracegirdle cipher. But how did you know that? You didn’t have the ciphertext.”
“No, but we found a Breeches Bible with pinholes in it, in Dunbarton’s library, pinholes through random letters. Bulstrode figured out that the selected letters were the cipher key and that a grille must have been part of the cipher. He knew a hell of a lot about antique ciphers.”
“That’s why you stole the grille from that church.”
“You know about that?” This with some alarm.
“I know everything. Why didn’t you just steal the Bible?”
The Book of Air and Shadows Page 40