The Book of Air and Shadows

by Michael Gruber

  “They’re here, in an apartment belongs to a friend of mine up on the East Side. Miriam’s with them.”

  Of course. That’s why a savvy city kid like Imogen had walked without a fuss into a strange car in Zurich: the occupant had been no stranger, but her beloved Aunt Miri.

  “Then I’d like to see them,” I said.

  “Not a problem. You’ll go get the manuscript, we’ll take a drive, we’ll see the kids, everything’ll be fine.”

  “And if not, what? They’ll stop having the time of their life? You’ll cut off pieces?”

  He sighed dramatically and said a brief something in a language I didn’t know, but which I supposed was Hebrew. The thugs laughed. To me he said, “Don’t be stupid. I’m not going to hurt anyone. But you are going to get me that manuscript, and you know it, so why fuck around?”

  “What about Shvanov? He thinks it belongs to him.”

  Again the hand waggle. “Shvanov is a putz. He’s a small-time loan shark with fucking delusions of grandeur.” He raised his voice and called out to the driver, “Misha, let’s go.”

  The car moved smoothly away from the curb.

  “Where’re we going?” I asked.

  “To your place, to get the thing, where’d you think?”

  “No,” I said.

  “No? What do you mean, no?”

  “Just what I said. Why should I give it to you? And how the hell did you get involved in this at all?”

  He rolled his eyes and sat back in the cushioned seat, with his hands laced across his belly and his dark eyes (mine!) regarding me with the amused contempt I recalled as being their almost perpetual expression during my childhood. “Jake, your problem is you got my kisser and your mother’s brains. That wasn’t the good combo.”

  “Fuck you!”

  “An example-you’re sitting in a car with three guys who’d rip your eyeballs out with their thumbs as easy as they’d pick their nose and you’re using language? To me? But since you’re family I’m not going to get mad, I’m going to explain to you the situation here. Okay, I’m in Tel Aviv, I’m semiretired but I still keep an interest, a nice deal comes along I might go in on it. I have a lot of connections. So Shvanov-he’s in Israel three, four months ago and he’s talking big, he’s got a line on the treasure of the ages but he won’t say what it is, and people are thinking he’s on to some gold, some art, because he’s talking to people who handle that kind of thing. I’m curious, and the next time I see Miriam I ask her what her pal Osip is up to and she tells me about Shvanov and this Bulstrode character and the Shakespeare manuscript. Of course, by that time Bulstrode’s dead-why, I never figured out…”

  “Shvanov thought he brought it back from England and was holding out.”

  “Okay, that’s the problem with Shvanov right there,” said Izzy, “he’s too quick with his hands, he doesn’t think it through, and so he goes and kills the one guy with the best line on this thing. Anyway, after that, Miriam tells me you’re involved, you have these papers that point the way to the thing, so I talk to some people and we set up a little syndicate, start an operation to keep an eye on you and Shvanov and see if we can get our hands on this. And then it starts to look like you and this guinea, what’s-his-face…”

  “Crosetti.”

  “Yeah, him: it looks like you’ve got the best leads on it, so we start to follow you…”

  “So it was you and not Shvanov’s, who mugged me in front of my apartment and broke into Crosetti’s house and made me kill two people?”

  He shrugged. “Someone associated with the syndicate set that up, and I have to say, you buy cheap, you get cheap. The fuckin city’s full of Russian patzers don’t know their ass from a hole in the ground. These boys here, on the other hand, are a whole different proposition, in case you get any ideas.”

  “But before that you sent someone to pretend to be Bulstrode’s niece and she stole the manuscript I got from Bulstrode.”

  “I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”

  I studied his face; no liar more skillful than Izzy, but the look of confusion appeared genuine.

  “Never mind,” I said, “so that was your gang following us in Europe?”

  “I don’t have a gang, Jake. Izzy Numbers, remember? I got nothing to do with any rough shit, never had, never will.”

  “So who are these eyeball-tweezer guys in this car?”

  “They work for people you don’t need to know their names. People in Israel, people in Europe-I told you, it’s a syndicate. Shvanov proposed a simple deal. If he gets hold of this thing, we make sure it’s authenticated up the ass, total legit, Shvanov has the guy to do it, and we agree to buy it off him. He’s asking ten million, the thing’s worth maybe a hundred, hundred fifty mill, but who knows?”

  “But you’re trying to grab it without Shvanov, aren’t you?”

  “Oh, the lightbulb goes off. Of course, we’re trying to grab it if it’s up for grabs. Ten million is ten million, and why should we give it to that cocksucker?”

  “So why did they send you? I thought you were above all this kind of work.”

  “Because if there’s an item in play might be worth a hundred fifty mill, they want someone honest on the scene.”

  “You? Honest?”

  Another dramatic sigh, a specialty of his. “Yeah, me. Tell me, counselor, did it ever fucking occur to you how come I’m still alive? I’ll tell you why. Because I been in this business nearly sixty years, handling fucking billions of dollars, almost all of it in untraceable cash, and I never skimmed a nickel. If Izzy the Book says the numbers add up, they add up. If he says they don’t, guys get whacked. This is in a business full of momsers who’d cut your throat for your shoes. So don’t you look down your nose at me!”

  “Oh, excuse me, I beg your pardon: you have a sterling rep with the scum of humanity. You walked out on us, you piece of shit.”

  “Oh, and you didn’t? The difference is you did it because you couldn’t stop chasing strange pussy and I did it so I wouldn’t do twenty in Sing Sing. You would’ve been happy to see me in the joint? How the hell would I have supported you?”

  “You didn’t support us.”

  “No? Did you ever miss a meal, ever not have a roof over your head or a warm bed to sleep in, ever not have toys and clothes? You think she supported three kids on her salary, pushing a mop in a hospital?”

  “She didn’t push a mop. She was an administrator.”

  “My sweet ass, she was! Schmuck! She could barely read the Daily News. How the fuck could you believe she was handling medical paper? Listen, I sent each of you a card with money in it every birthday and every Christmas, and every year they came back with ‘not at this address’ written on it in her writing. And no money in them either. She steamed them open, took the cash, and sent them back to me. Fuck you, Izzy!”

  “I don’t believe you,” I said, with my stomach roiling and a splash of bile high in my throat.

  “Then go to hell, you want to hold a grudge your whole life. Meanwhile, here we are. People live in factories now, I can’t believe it. Go up and get this fucking thing and then, alivai, you’ll never have to see my face again. Eli, go with him, make sure he doesn’t trip on the stairs.”

  When I got out of the limo, my knees were so weak with fury that I staggered. I had to lean on my front door for a few moments and my hand shook when I used my key. I entered and Mr..22 followed me at a discreet distance, enough, that is, to put a few rounds in me if I tried anything. When I reached my door I had a spasm of coughing.

  “I’m sorry,” I said to Eli, “I have a little asthma and it acts up when I’m upset.” He gave an uninterested nod and pointed to the lock. I opened the door and stepped in and the man followed at his usual careful distance and received a heavy blow on the head from a barbell rod wielded by Omar, lying in wait next to the door. The coughing fit I staged had been one of Omar’s little signals.

  “Who is he?” he asked.

  “An Is
raeli,” I said sadistically, and then had to stop Omar from breaking more than a few of the man’s ribs with his foot.

  I went to my filing cabinet while Omar taped the man up and I retrieved the Shakespeare manuscript, my laptop, the FedEx envelope from Paul, and my German pistol.

  “What are we doing, boss?” Omar asked.

  I had no idea, but defying Izzy, even over a fake, seemed essential to me now, and after the revelations of the last few minutes I had come up with a plan of my own, one that had nothing to do with any member of my family. “The roof,” I said.

  One of the peculiarities of this part of town is that once on the roof of any building one can pass along the whole street by climbing over low parapets and then descend via one of the fire escapes with which these old loft buildings are generously supplied. Since burglars know this too, the roof doors are alarmed; since this is New York, no one pays any attention to the alarms.

  We raced across the rooftops and climbed down onto Varick Street, out of sight of my father’s limo. From there it was an easy matter to go to the garage and get the Lincoln. In the car I called Mickey Haas.

  “You’re joking,” he exclaimed when I told him what I had. I assured him I was not and told him a little of the recent cryptanalysis and the adventures of Carolyn and Albert in Warwickshire.

  “Good Christ! You say you’ve recovered all the spy letters?”

  “Yes, and it’s quite a tale.”

  “Oh, Jesus, I’m nauseated. Jake, you have to come to my office this very second. I can’t believe this-you have the actual manuscript of an unknown Shakespeare play in your fucking hands!”

  “On my lap, actually. But, Mickey? I’m in a bit of a jam here. You remember those gangsters we discussed? Well, they’re after me, and one of the gangs is being run by my father.”

  “Just get up here, Jake. I mean it, just drive to my office-”

  “Mickey, you’re not listening. These people are on my tail and it won’t take them long to figure out that I might want to show this thing to you and then they’ll come up to where you are and kill the two of us and take it.”

  “But this is Hamilton Hall in broad daylight. We can just walk over and deposit it in the-”

  “No, you’re not getting this, man. Listen to me! These are completely ruthless people with almost unlimited resources and they would be happy to wipe out everyone in Hamilton Hall to get their hands on this thing.”

  “You have to be kidding-”

  “You keep saying that but it happens to be true. Between this minute and the time when you announce the existence and authenticity of this item in public we are totally vulnerable to these people.”

  Or words to that effect. I recall that Mickey made a lot of noise over the phone, cursing and shrieking because he couldn’t see this pile of paper right away. It was quite an act, better than I would have given him credit for. Between the two of us I always considered myself the actor. I told him my plan: I would get a four-wheel-drive vehicle and go up to his place on Lake Henry. I had been there many times and knew how to get there and where he stashed the keys. In a while, a couple of days maybe, he would come up and join me and look over the material, both the spy letters on my laptop and the manuscript and render an opinion and also take a sample of the ink and paper to be tested in a lab. That done and should the thing prove real, we would drive to some neutral city, Boston perhaps, and call a press conference. And he agreed to this, as I knew he would. Before ending the call I made him swear on the Bard that he would tell absolutely no one where I was or what our plans were, and as soon as I was off the line with him I rang an exotic car rental place on Broadway at Waverly and arranged for the Escalade I’ve already mentioned. In less than an hour I was on the Henry Hudson, heading north in my comfy domestic tank.

  And here I am. Perhaps it’s time for a summing-up, but what should it be? Unlike Dick Bracegirdle, I am a modern man and thus further than he was from moral truth. My mind is still reeling from my interview with my father. Could what he said possibly have been true? Who could I ask? Not my siblings. Miriam would not know the truth if it bit her on her liposuctioned ass and Paul…I suppose Paul thinks he has a professional commitment with the truth but he is also in service to a Higher Truth, and people in such service are often inclined to lie like bastards when defending same. What if everything I thought about my past was wrong? What if I am a kind of fictional character, fed with lies for the purposes of others, or maybe for no purpose at all, or for sadistic amusement? Being alone, having no social function just now, aggravates this feeling of unreality, or incipient madness. Perhaps I will start to hallucinate, whatever hallucinations are. Although feeling one is going mad is supposedly a sign one is not. If you really go crazy, everything makes perfect sense.

  What is the ground of reality then, once you admit mnemonic forgery? When I consider this question I have to think of Amalie. As far as I know, Amalie has never told a serious lie in her life. I mean, I believe she would lie to save someone, like to the Gestapo about a hidden fugitive, otherwise not. But it turns out that if you consistently lie to someone like that, they sort of have to withdraw their function as the foundation of your reality, like a little snail pulling in its horns, leaving you adrift in a dense and opaque gas of fiction. It’s not intentional on their part, it’s an aspect of the underlying physics of the moral universe. And so, thus adrift, I naturally produce nothing but more fiction. I am a lawyer and what is a lawyer but someone hired to produce a work of fiction, which, in court, will be compared with opposing counsel’s work of fiction by a judge or jury, and they will decide which fiction most closely resembles the fictional picture of the world in their respective brains and decide for one or another side and thus is justice done. And in private life, I will continue to dream up people to play in the continuing tedious novel of my existence, Miranda, for example, as the Ultimately Satisfying Mate (and by God I am still thinking about her, wanting her, that phantasm) and Mickey Haas as the Best Friend.

  Well, in the midst of this sorry maundering, my sister just called. Reception is quite good here, for there is a tower right on the property, artfully painted to resemble the trunk of a pine. Here is how plans break down. My father had stashed her and my children in an apartment known only to himself, and what did she do but journey from that apartment to her own apartment on Sutton Place to get some clothes and other things, her Botox perhaps, and she took the kids along with her because they were getting so bored with being cooped up and needless to say some of Shvanov’s people were waiting for her there and they took the kids. So the quasi-fictional kidnapping is now a real one. This occurred early this morning and they tied her up, and it was only the cleaning person’s arrival that released her. My sister is not really that stupid, but she does like to look her best.

  I did not expect this part of it. But I did and do expect the imminent arrival of various parties to l’affaire Bracegirdle. Mickey will come, because he wants to complete the last part of his marvelous scam, but he will not come alone. I am trying, for the record, to recall when I first understood that Mickey was himself the tertium quid we had discussed, the link between Bulstrode and Shvanov. The mind assembles bits of information in its own time and then the revelation. I can’t imagine why I did not immediately see this. Who else could it be? Maybe it was when Oliver March told us the story about how Mickey had treated poor Bulstrode or maybe it was when I learned that Shvanov was a loan shark who had done well out of the market crash, lending money to rich assholes suddenly illiquid. And is not Mickey a rich asshole with money problems? And did I imagine that his wives, in the midst of the sort of arguments Mickey always got into with his wives, would not have, as a sort of marital nuclear strike, confront him with the fact that I had screwed them all, and would that not make him hate me and plan some terrible revenge? Why didn’t I think of all this? Because I had dreamed him up as the Best Friend, of course. The Confidant.

  I also must have known at some deep level after our meetin
g with the forger Pascoe that there was only one person in my ambit who could have come up with the scam he was hired to assist, the world’s premier Shakespeare expert, the only person who had connections with Shvanov, with Bulstrode, with Jake “The Schmuck” Mishkin. He is about to take a bunch of Jewish gangsters for many millions of dollars, and I rather doubt that I can do anything to stop him. In a strange way, he’s like my father: When Izzy says the numbers add up, no one can doubt him. When Mickey says it’s Shakespeare, ditto.

  The question remains why I came up to his place in the country rather than really hiding out in one of the zillion anonymous and untraceable places available to a man with a supply of ready cash. Because I am tired of this. I want to be real. I don’t care very much if they kill me but I do want to emerge into the realm of truth before that. Very noble sentiment, Mishkin, but there is one other reason. I realized quite recently that the picture that Miranda presented to me-her hairstyle, her dress, her whole aspect-was designed to be as much like my wife when I first met her as it was possible to contrive. That was what knocked me off my admittedly not very secure perch, that was the inside curveball. And who knew what that distant girl was like, who had seen her innumerable times back then, who had heard from my very lips just what turned me on about her? Why the Best Friend, of course. God, this is banal. Any halfway intelligent future reader of this will have seen it coming long before I did, but isn’t that true to nature, don’t we see everyone else’s secrets but our own, the mote in our brother’s eye? Yes, good old Mickey set me up, and God help me, I hope that as part of his revenge he brings her along. I would like to see her one more time.

  22

  On the subway, Crosetti could hardly stop laughing to himself, and not entirely to himself, which drew looks from the others in the car. A woman with two small kids in tow changed her seat. Laughing because there he was back on the subway after some weeks of living the high life, private jets and five-star hotels and everything paid for, and having just dropped off what was essentially the budget of Titanic. The ten grand, or maybe even the fifty, would help, though, if he ever got it. No, Mishkin would pay. He was a sleazebag, but not that kind of sleazebag. The money would mean that he could take some time off, work on his screenplay, and, with his savings, just about get through NYU film school.