The Book of Air and Shadows

by Michael Gruber

  “I hate this! Get out of there and go someplace else!” Incredibly stupid, I know, but the idea of Crosetti sharing a house with Amalie got under my skin.

  “Fine, we’ll stay at a hotel. Look, do you want to hear this…it’s important.”

  Grumpily, I told him to spit it out. It was quite a story. The long and short was that Rolly had smuggled a copy of the grille away from the bad guys and they had been able to decipher the spy letters. I am trying to recall what I felt when I heard this and I suppose the answer is, not that much, because I knew the whole thing was a fraud. I told him to e-mail me a copy of the decipher and asked, “So, does it locate the play?”

  “It says he buried his copy, and waits for an answer from Rochester. He was double-crossing Dunbarton and wanted to use the play as proof of the plot. He may have gotten his answer and dug up the play and then who knows what happened to it?”

  “Wait a second-one of the ciphered letters was to someone else?”

  “Yeah, the Earl of Rochester, the man Dunbarton was conspiring against. Dunbarton apparently got caught plotting and decided to cover his tracks by whacking both Bracegirdle and the Bard. Bracegirdle panicked and tried to rifle the playhouse strongbox to fund his getaway, got caught, confessed all to Shakespeare, and they decided to blow the whistle. There’re some pages missing from this letter but it’s still pretty clear. Shakespeare knew some high-level people who could vouch for the whole thing and they wrote the letter in the same cipher.”

  “And they weren’t afraid that Dunbarton might get hold of it and read it?”

  “No, that’s the beauty of his cipher: all you needed was a grille, which is easy to copy, and a reference to a page in the Breeches Bible and you’re all set, but unless you have the page to start on you’re out of luck. He must’ve hand-delivered the grille, the ciphered letter, and the page reference to one of Rochester’s people and…”

  I didn’t care about the details and said so, adding, “So we still don’t have the whereabouts of the play?”

  “No. He wrote that he has the directions where they’ll be safe, whatever that means. Apparently you also need that range finder he invented.”

  “Oh, good. I’ll check out Portobello Road. So that’s it? A dead end.”

  “It looks like it, boss, unless someone has retained a trove of Bracegirdliana. On the other hand, this is still the biggest find for Shakespeare scholarship since forever. It should be worth a bundle to the Folger.”

  “Yes. And what are your plans now?”

  “Back to New York, I guess. Carolyn owns the ciphers, so she’ll want to sell them. Amalie said you knew a big-time Shakespeare scholar…”

  “I do. Mickey Haas-what about him?”

  “Well, maybe you could ask him to handle the sale-in exchange for first look and all that.”

  “I’d be glad to. And if you want to return with me, we’ll be leaving late on Thursday, day after tomorrow, from Biggin Hill. And, Crosetti? Forget about what I said about Amalie and about leaving the house. I’m a little nuts nowadays.”

  Why didn’t I tell him at that moment that it was a fraud? I can’t recall, but it must have been the fear that if I short-circuited the denouement of the scam I would not get to see Miranda again. Perhaps more than a little nuts.

  I went to my meetings, had my flirt, as I’ve said, and a charming dinner with Miss Whoever-Someone, but I put her in a cab with a mere handshake, unmauled. The next day I met Paul for breakfast in the Dorchester and handed him the printouts of the e-mail Crosetti had sent. He sat and read them while I sipped coffee. When he was done I asked him what he thought.

  “Brilliant,” he said, “I almost wish it were real.”

  After that we talked about Mickey and the dead Bulstrode and the scholarly life, and about Mary, Queen of Scots, and how no one was able to actually pin down what she’d actually done. Had she really conspired to kill her husband, Lord Darnley? What had possessed her to marry a maniac like Bothwell? Did she write the incriminating letters that plotted the assassination of Elizabeth? Why did she never, in the entire course of her life, stop to think?

  I said I didn’t know-it was all Masterpiece Theatre to me. It wouldn’t be the first time, however, that the fate of nations swung on someone wanting a piece of ass to which they were not strictly entitled.

  “Yes, but what would Shakespeare have made of her? I mean he had absolutely nothing to work with on Cleopatra and Lady Macbeth and the women in the history plays and here he had loads of material, and it was all about something that happened in his grandparents’ time. He must have heard people talking about it when he was a kid, especially in a Catholic part of the country like Warwickshire.”

  “Well, we’ll never know, will we? Speaking of conspirators, have you heard from the Russians?”

  “Not a peep. I can’t believe you’re not interested in this. You’re supposed to be the romantic one in the family.”

  “Me? I’m the prosaic one. Intellectual property law? You’re the war hero. And priest.”

  “The most antiromantic profession.”

  “Please! There’s nothing more romantic than a priest. The unobtainable is the essence of romance. That’s half of what brings the suckers in, the fascination with celibacy. Plus you guys get to dress up as women without looking ridiculous.”

  “Or not very ridiculous,” said Paul, grinning. “Although as I recall, you were the one who used to dress up in Mutti’s clothes.”

  “Oh, now you’re definitely trying to drive me crazy. I never dressed up in-”

  “Yeah, you did, you and Miriam were always going through her bureau. Ask her if you don’t believe me. She sends her love, by the way.”

  “Where is she?”

  “In transit. She called last night. She wanted to know what we were up to, but didn’t want to seem prying-you know how she tries to weasel stuff out of you when you’d be perfectly willing to tell her if she’d just ask up front?”

  “Yeah, and getting anything out of her is like picking crabmeat. Does ‘in transit’ mean she’s in Europe?”

  “So I gathered,” said Paul vaguely. “My impression was that she’s on her way to see Dad.”

  “How about you? Going to join them?”

  “I might, as long as I’m here,” he said, with his annoying smile.

  “All forgiven, is he?”

  “It comes with the job.”

  “And he’s all apologetic for what he did?”

  “Not in the least. He’s never said a word to me or Miri about that time, or about Mother. He thinks I’m a jerk and a clown and treats Miri like a servant. As far as I can see he hasn’t changed one bit since Brooklyn, except he’s older, richer, more corrupt, and boinking successively younger women. Oh, and of course, politically he’s a total fascist, way to the right of Kach. Death to the Arabs, Sharon a sellout, the usual.”

  “Charming. Paul, why the hell do you waste your time with him?”

  His turn to shrug. “Filial duty. Or so Miri doesn’t have to carry the whole load by herself. Or maybe I have hope that he’ll put himself in a position where I can give him what he needs.”

  “What would that be?”

  “I’m not sure. Penitence and reconciliation? My prayer is that I’ll know it when it happens. In the meantime, he’s my father, and although he’s a nasty bastard he’s still part of me, and it does me good to see him every once in a while. You should try it sometime.”

  I said I’d pass on that and he didn’t press me. He never does. I can’t recall the rest of the conversation and I had left my little machine in my room, but I vividly recall the next time I saw my brother, which was when he burst into my room at about ten that evening with the news that my children were missing.

  Of course, Amalie had called me first on my cell, but as you have probably gathered by now, I dislike them intensely and always turn mine off during meetings and this evening I had forgotten to turn it back on, and I also recall that I had neglected to inform her I wa
s staying at the Dorchester instead of my usual Knightsbridge place. Therefore, she could not get ahold of me and called Paul instead.

  I immediately called her, of course. In a curiously dead voice she told me the story. Amalie had taken the children ice-skating near her house. Ice-skating is Niko’s sole athletic activity, so his mother is always ready to take him to the rink. He typically skates in tight obsessive circles, staring down at the ice. Imogen is a fair figure skater and loves any sort of showing off. They went out with Crosetti and his girlfriend and afterward had their hot chocolate at Zic-Zac. The kids finished and ran outside to wait, the way kids will, especially if their mother thinks they are rude American barbarians not fit to be served in even a low-end Zurich joint. The adults finished their coffee and pastries, and when they emerged the kids were gone. A bystander told her that a sedan had pulled up to the curb, a blond woman had stuck her head out the window, engaged them in conversation, and they had both jumped into the car willingly. She assumed that they knew the woman in the car, or she would have given the alarm. Of course, my first thought was that it was Miranda, and I have to confess that for a brief moment I felt a kind of joy-even though she was a criminal who had kidnapped my children, she was in a way back in my life, I might see her again!

  “I’ll come right over,” I said to my wife, “I can be there by seven.”

  But she said she didn’t want me. She said I should have been there already, that it had happened because I wasn’t there, because I had broken up the family and let nastiness into what should have been the safe refuge of our home, and do you now pretend to offer me comfort? I don’t want your comfort. You have no comfort to give. And now that your children have been taken by gangsters you will be even more free to do whatever it is you want, and do you want to know what I feel? I feel I was so foolish as to want to raise children with a man like you, I thought yes, I could fix it all with love, I could spread a blanket of love around all of us so that in this frightful world there would be one corner that would be for us alone but no, you didn’t want this, you tore it to pieces my poor little blanket and now what will you do, Jake, on what basis will you mourn for your children? Will you even miss them very much? I don’t even know that and so how can you come and sit with me and give me comfort?

  And a good deal more in this vein, with me making excuses and defense and for God’s sake Amalie what are you doing? Have the police been notified? And all sorts of operational stuff that I wanted her to focus on, not to mention the thought (which I was not ready to share with her) that the only reason anyone would have snatched my kids was to trade them for the Item. Which I had not got, and had not much hope of getting if Crosetti was right, and on and on talking past each other like people in a postmodernist play, and eventually she said she didn’t want to talk with me at all anymore and asked to speak with Paul. I gave him the phone and sat on the bed, dull and paralyzed, staring at the desk, which happened to be in my direct line of sight. The desk was covered with neat stacks of paper and folders in various colors into which I was arranging the results of my recent legal work, my laptop computer glowed invitingly and the demons put into my mind the thought that oh, well, I still had my work; no family, shame about that, but still…and then followed the realization of what my work actually was, at which point I went matagalp, as I believe they call it in the Philippines.

  I let out a howl like King Kong and began to tear the room apart. I overturned the desk, the chair crashed into the mirror, the laptop went clattering into the bathroom. I threw a fairly heavy Regency armchair through the window and was trying to toss all the papers and my briefcase after it when Paul tackled me. I am, of course, much stronger than he is, but he managed to get me in a painful hold of the type used to disable sentries and after a few seconds of painful, futile struggle my rage collapsed into sobbing. I believe I screamed and cried for some time and then the police came because of the broken window, but Paul was able to deal with that, since priests are nearly always given the benefit of the doubt.

  Some hours later, having Xanaxed myself into dull apathy, the expected call came through. Paul took it on the hotel phone and handed it to me. The voice was accented, Russian maybe, but not Shvanov’s. This person was not threatening in any way, explained that he was not a barbarian, that my children were safe and comfortable, not taped to chairs in abandoned factories or anything, and neither you nor your wife was going to be so foolish as to involve the police. I assured him we would not. He said that all this could be handled in a civilized way, since I surely knew what they wanted, and that as soon as I had obtained it I should place an ad on such and such a Web site and they would contact me, and when I said I had no idea where the goddamn thing was he said, we’re patient and we have confidence in you and broke the connection. Nearly as soon as I hung up, my cell phone made the noise it makes when there’s a message waiting and I went into my mailbox and there was a photo of both kids smiling and a message from Imogen: “Hi, Dad, we’re okay and healthy and not getting tortured like in the movies. Don’t worry, okay?” Proof of life, they call it, very professional. And she really did sound okay.

  Okay, fast-forward a little. Paul’s gone. He wanted to stay and talk but I kicked him out, mainly because he was taking the kidnapping worse than I was and I had no taste for his empathy. I’m alone in the wrecked suite. The management has placed heavy plastic over the window, but I told them I would pick up the place myself, to gather my important confidential papers. Money has been liberally schmeared among the staff. I am actually gathering up the papers and stuffing them any which way into my briefcase, when my eye falls on a thick pack of printouts that I don’t immediately recognize. On closer inspection I see it is the genealogy of the Bracegirdles that Niko prepared for me. I am about to toss it in the can when I notice that it’s the female branch, the one I never looked at. I sit on the edge of the bed and leaf through the stack and learn that Richard Bracegirdle has one surviving female relative in the direct line, a Mary Evans, born 1921, in Newton, Maryland, and still there residing.

  It’s 9:30 P.M. here, afternoon on the East Coast. I get the number and make the call. A woman’s voice. No, she’s sorry to say Miss Evans is deceased. Recently deceased. My speaker is Sheila McCorkle, and she’s a church lady from Miss Evans’s church, a Catholic church, of which the late Mary had been a pillar. Mrs. McCorkle is helping to clean out the place, and my! Isn’t there a lot of old stuff! I say I’m calling from London, England, which impresses her, and I ask her if she has disposed of any of Miss Evans’s possessions. No, not yet. Why? I tell her that I am the lawyer for the Bracegirdle family and would like to inspect Miss Evans’s home to see if there are any important memorabilia extant, would that be possible? It would, she supposes. I get her home number and make an appointment for the following day.

  Well, I was crazy, I suppose, to believe in such a long shot, but did not the great La Rochefoucauld say that there were situations so dire that one had to be half-crazy to get out of them alive? I called Crosetti and told him to get ready to move to London on my call, because I had a lead I was following up over in the States, and if it paid out I would need someone in England. A brief pause on the line. Shouldn’t he stay with Amalie? I said that this might be our only chance to get our hands on the Item, and that this was perhaps more critical to getting my kids back than any comfort he could give my wife. We made the arrangements and then I hung up on him and called our pilot.

  By six the next morning I was in the air flying back across the Atlantic. We had a tailwind and made it to Baltimore-Washington Airport in slightly over seven hours. Three hours after that I was pulling my rental Lincoln up to the front of a modest frame house sitting white and weathered under leafless oaks and dogwoods, in Newton, Maryland. Mrs. McCorkle proved to be a stout fiftyish lady with a homely open face, dressed in country work clothes, an apron, and gloves. Inside, the place had the burdened atmosphere of a long life eviscerated by death. The cartons were out and Mrs. Mc. was valiantly tryin
g to separate the salable from the junk. Miss Evans had been, she told me, a spinster (she used that now very unfamilar antique word), a sad case, had a fiancé once who didn’t come back from the war, had a father who lived too long, she took care of him, never married, poor thing, and yes, she was a Bracegirdle on her mother’s side, Catholic of course, from an old family she said, they came to America in 1679, one of Lord Baltimore’s Catholic shiploads, well, she could believe the old part, look at all this stuff, it looked like they hadn’t got rid of anything since 1680! Feel free to look around. Over there near the fireplace is the stuff I thought would sell. Her will left everything to St. Thomas’s, which is why I’m here.

  I looked at the box of books first. An old Douay Bible, crumbling leather, inside it a family tree going back to Margaret Bracegirdle, the original emigrant. Margaret had obviously married in America, and her sons and daughters had married, and the name was lost to the record books but not to memory, for there were numerous among the family tree who bore the ancestral name: Richard Bracegirdle Clement, Anne Bracegirdle Kerr…

  Putting the old Bible aside I dug deeper in the carton.

  It was a quarto, of course, its red full-calf binding leather nearly black with age and the covers and the endpapers foxed and swollen with damp, but the pages were all there, the binding was intact, and the name on the flyleaf in faded sepia ink was “Richard Bracegirdle” in the familiar hand. An edition of 1598, I noted, as I flipped through the front matter. Genesis was marked with tiny pinholes. On the back flyleaf were inscribed in that same hand a string of letters in fourteen uneven rows.

  I closed the book with a snap. Mrs. McCorkle looked up from her sorting and asked if I had found something I liked.

  “Yes, I have. Do you know what this is?”

  “A Bible, it looks like.”

  “It is. It’s a Geneva Bible, from 1598. It belonged to Richard Bracegirdle, an ancestor of your friend.”

  “Really? Is it valuable?”