So he was actually feeling fairly good when he walked into his mother’s house and was unpleasantly surprised by the reception he got. Mary Peg, it turned out, had wanted to see the thing and was outraged that her gormless son had again parted with a treasure, and beyond that, she had told Fanny Dubrowicz that it had been found and she of course was vibrating with anticipation. Fruitlessly did Crosetti explain that at least two independent criminal gangs were searching for it too, and that it was at present about as comfortable an object as an armed nuclear bomb, and in any case Mishkin had paid all the expenses for its recovery and provided protection, in the absence of which he might not have found it at all or, if he had, might at this moment be dead in a shallow English grave.
This had a sobering effect on Mary Peg, but only for a while, and it took all of Crosetti’s jollying skills and Klim’s as well, to bring her back into countenance. The children helped here. Crosetti stayed for supper, which was spaghetti and meatballs (and had been Spg & MB many, many times in the past week, confided Klim), and he marveled at the way a grandparentish milieu had been created from scratch out of what amounted to happenstance. It was the sort of thing that happened all the time in Dickens, Crosetti knew, but he had not looked for it in modern New York. Or perhaps, he thought later, all times were the same, the urge to form families always bubbling up from beneath the surface crud of selfishness. Mary Peg apparently had vast reserves of grandmaternal energies untapped as yet by her natural progeny, all still childless; and Klim had transformed himself into a granddad out of fairy tales: what stories he told, with funny faces, what clever carving of whistles and little toys, what horsey rides, what silly songs he knew, all with pokes and tickles involved! The children, especially the little girl, Molly, had blossomed under this treatment, as children do. They all believe implicitly in magic and think nothing of being carried away from the ogre’s castle to the land of the good fairies.
And Crosetti was happy for them all, but he did feel somewhat extra now, as if this development had confirmed his instinct that his time in his mother’s home was quite over. Besides, there was no room. Besides, it made him uncomfortable to see Rolly staring out at him from her children’s faces. He packed his things, hired a U-Haul trailer for the family car to pull, and was out by the following evening with, however, a check for ten grand from Mishkin that had arrived that morning in a FedEx envelope. No one insisted that he stay.
He was unpacking cartons to music in his new shared loft when he felt his phone vibrating in his pocket. He unplugged his earbuds and put the phone to his cheek.
“Write this down. I have thirty seconds.”
“Carolyn?”
“Write this down. Oh, Christ, you have to help me!” And there followed an address and directions to a lakeside house in the Adirondacks. Crosetti pulled out a ballpoint and scribbled the information on the underside of his left forearm.
“Carolyn, where are you? What the hell is going on?”
“Just come and don’t dial this number. They’re going to kill-” with the rest of the sentence lost in static.
Not good, Crosetti thought, a cliché in fact, especially that business with the call cutting out. The film was going to end on a downer note, bittersweet, tracking the hero returning to his work, maybe the hint of a relationship with the kids, life goes on, or maybe even a hint that Rolly is still alive, a teaser: but not this banal…and he actually kept thinking this way for minutes, stacking books on raw pine shelving, before the reality of the call sank in. Sweat popped out on his face and he had to sit down on the dusty, sprung easy chair he’d scavenged off the street. She really is going to drive me crazy, he thought; no, make that past tense. Okay, I’m game, he thought, I’m an international man of mystery too. What do I need? The Smith & Wesson was back at his mother’s house, and no way was he going back there and explain why he needed it, and now that he thought about actually handling the thing again…no, thanks. But he had hiking boots, check. Richard Widmark black seaman’s sweater, check. Ball cap? No, the watch cap, much better, and the Swiss Army knife, and the grenade launcher…no, just kidding, and the trusty black slicker, still with the mud of Old England on it, wallet, keys, oh, binoculars, can’t forget those, and boy, I’m about as ready as I’ll ever be to face God knows how many heavily armed Russian mobsters…
“Come again?”
It was Beck, one of the roommates, looking at him from the doorway with a peculiar expression. Beck was a cadaverous being who worked as a sound engineer and wrote reviews of films no one but him had ever seen, or perhaps did not yet exist.
“I didn’t say anything,” said Crosetti.
“Yeah, you were talking, loud, like you were pissed off. I thought you had someone in there with you and then I remembered you came in alone.”
“Oh, then I was talking to myself. I’m having a psychotic break is all.”
“Fuck, man, join the club. If you need a lobotomy I could start sharpening the screwdriver.”
“It’s a girl,” Crosetti admitted. “A girl has driven me crazy. She dumped me and now she wants me to rescue her. This is the second time for the dump ’n’ rescue motif.”
“Whatever. I tend to stick to the gospel according to St. Nelson Algren: never fuck anyone with more problems than you have yourself. Of course, he fucked Simone de Beauvoir…”
“Thank you. I’ll remember that in my next life. Meanwhile, a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. Can I borrow your computer? I need some maps.”
It took him the usual forty-five minutes to clear the city but on the thruway past the Tappan Zee he made up for lost time. The old Fury had been maintained in perfect trim: inside was a 440-cubic-inch V-8 engine and outside was waxed midnight blue lacquer, plus the various shields and decals that police officers use to identify themselves to other police officers so as to render their cars virtually immune to any ticketing, whether rolling or parked. Crosetti cranked it up to ninety and made it to Albany in a little over two hours. Another ninety miles and seventy minutes got him to Pottersville, where he filled his tank and ate a horrible gas station microwave meal, by which time it was dark and snowing, fat floaters that seemed the size of golf balls when they hit the glass, although it was still too warm for the snow to stick to the asphalt of the highway and he did not slow down. Crosetti was deep in the blankness of the freeway dream, on autopilot, his brain running with plots of movies, odd facts, straining for coherent memories of trivial life occurrences, including especially his pathetically brief skein of days in the company of Carolyn Rolly.
State Route 2, which he turned onto fifteen minutes later, was a narrow tunnel of headlight through a shake-up snow-globe toy; after the zoom of the thruway, Crosetti felt like he was parked. He drove for what seemed like an impossibly long interval and at last a few lights shone ahead, which was New Weimar, two gas stations, some tourist traps, a scatter of houses, and then the search for the sign that marked the gravel road to Lake Henry. He missed it once and had to slew the car around on the snowy road and backtrack until he found the thing, bent over at an angle and full of bullet holes. Thus did the armed locals take out their class rage on the rich people who owned the lake.
An even narrower tunnel now and here the snow was sticking well, making the car fishtail on the hills. Time slowed; he lost track of its passage. The Fury boasted only an old-fashioned AM radio, which, for the last dozen miles or so, had produced only static-filled country music. He switched it off. Now only the hiss of the wipers, the competent purr of the great engine. A flash of yellow ahead a double arrow, the road ending in a T. He switched on the dome light and read his maps. A right turn then, and shortly there appeared a cluster of mailboxes, thick with the wet snow, and a white-clotted driveway. He pulled the car forward a dozen yards, took a four-cell flashlight from the glove compartment, and started down the drive. It was a little after three in the morning.
And here was the house, a substantial country lodge made of stripped logs, with a sharply peaked roof
and a wide veranda running along three sides. A thin light spread from the front windows and made a yellowish patch on the new snow. As Crosetti walked around the house he felt, rather than saw, the presence of the lake, absolute blackness where the snow ended, with a thin white finger pointing into it, the dock.
He carefully mounted the steps to the veranda, pressed his face against the lighted window, saw a large room, rustic furniture made of polished cedar logs and upholstered in red plaid, a huge stone fireplace with a fire blazing away in it, Indian rugs on the floor, a moosehead over the fireplace. On another wall was a large built-in bookcase and an elaborate and expensive-looking sound system. No movement visible, no sounds. He tried the door, which swung open when he turned the brass knob, and he entered and closed the door behind him. Once inside he could hear over the whisper of the fire some domestic sounds from another room, clink of crockery, and a man’s humming. The place smelled of cedar, and the fire, and, faintly, fresh coffee. There was a round pine table near the side windows with a glowing laptop computer on it. Next to it was a familiar thick padded envelope. Crosetti was about to take a peek at the screen when Jake Mishkin entered the room carrying a steaming mug.
He stopped short and stared. “Crosetti? What’re you doing here?”
“I was in the neighborhood. I thought I’d drop by.”
Mishkin smiled faintly. “That’s a good line. Would you like some coffee? I’m having mine with Irish whiskey in it.”
“Thank you. That’d be great.”
Mishkin started to go back to the kitchen, then stopped and went to the laptop and snapped the screen down. Crosetti sat on the sofa that faced the fire and gave way a little to his exhaustion, feeling now that strange sensation one has after a marathon drive, of still traveling fast behind the wheel of a car. In a few minutes Mishkin returned with another mug and set it on the pickled pine coffee table in front of the couch.
“I trust this is not about your check,” said Mishkin after they had both drunk a little.
“No, I got that all right, thanks.”
“Then, to what do I owe…?”
“Carolyn Rolly. I got a panicky call from her giving me the address of this place and so I came up.”
“You drove-what? Eight hours through a snowstorm because Carolyn Rolly beckoned?”
“Yeah, it’s kind of hard to explain.”
“True love.”
“Not really, but…it’s something. Basically, I’m just being a schmuck.”
“I can relate to that,” said Mishkin, “as it happens, she’s not here, and I should point out that I’m expecting other visitors. There might be unpleasantness.”
“You mean Shvanov.”
“And others.”
“For instance?”
“For instance, Mickey Haas, the famous Shakespearean scholar and a dear friend of mine. This is his place we’re in. He’s coming up to authenticate our manuscript.”
“I thought you needed a lot of technical equipment for that, carbon dating, ink analysis…”
“Yes, but clever forgers can fake the ink and paper. What can’t be faked is Shakespeare’s actual writing, and Mickey is the man for that.”
“And he’s with Shvanov?”
“That’s a long story I’m afraid.”
Crosetti shrugged. “I got plenty of time, unless you’re going to force me at gunpoint out into a raging blizzard.”
Mishkin stared at him for a while and Crosetti held the stare for an unnatural interval. At last, Mishkin sighed and said, “We’ll need more coffee.”
Another pot, then, also with whiskey, and toward the end of it they dispensed with the coffee. They talked in the manner of strangers who have survived a shipwreck or some historic disaster which, while it leaves similar marks, does nothing to provide elective affinity. The two men were not friends, nor ever would be, but the thing that had brought them together, to this house on this snowy night, that lay now in its envelope on the round table, allowed them to speak to each other more openly than either of them normally would; and the whiskey helped.
Mishkin supplied the fuller version of his involvement with Bulstrode, and his sad life, not stinting on a description of his own sins, and when he came to his connection with the supposed Miranda Kellogg and his hopes regarding her, Crosetti said, “According to Carolyn she was an actress Shvanov hired to get the manuscript away from you.”
“Yes, I thought it was something like that. Do you…did she say what happened to her?”
“She didn’t know,” said Crosetti shortly and then began to speak about his own family and about movies, ones he loved and ones he wanted to make, and Mishkin seemed remarkably interested, fascinated in fact, with both of these subjects, about what it was like to grow up in a boisterous and happy family, and whether movies really determined our sense of how to behave, and more than that, our sense of what was real.
“Surely not,” Mishkin objected. “Surely it’s the other way around-filmmakers take popular ideas and embody them in films.”
“No, the movies come first. For example, no one ever had a fast-draw face-to-face shoot-out on the dusty Main Street in a western town. It never happened, ever. A screenwriter invented it for dramatic effect. It’s the classic American trope, redemption through violence, and it comes through the movies. There were very few handguns in the real old west. They were expensive and heavy and no one but an idiot would wear them in a side holster. On a horse? When you wanted to kill someone in the Old West, you waited for your chance and shot him in the back, usually with a shotgun. Now we have a zillion handguns because the movies taught us that a handgun is something a real man has to have, and people really kill each other like fictional western gunslingers. And it’s not just thugs. Movies shape everyone’s reality, to the extent that it’s shaped by human action-foreign policy, business, sexual relationships, family dynamics, the whole nine yards. It used to be the Bible but now it’s movies. Why is there stalking? Because we know that the guy should persist and make a fool of himself until the girl admits that she loves him. We’ve all seen it. Why is there date rape? Because the asshole is waiting for the moment when resistance turns to passion. He’s seen Nicole and Reese do it fifty times. We make these little decisions, day by day, and we end up with a world. This one, like it or not.”
“So screenwriters are the unacknowledged legislators of mankind.”
“You got it,” said Crosetti. “I mean we’re in a movie now. Why in hell are the two of us waiting in an isolated cabin for a bunch of gangsters? It’s nuts. Why is a hundred-million-dollar manuscript sitting on a table in that isolated cabin? Totally wack. I’ll tell you why. Because we both made a chain of decisions, and each of those decisions was conditioned by a movie theme. When the mysterious girl calls John Cusack and tells him to rescue her, he doesn’t say, ‘Get real, bitch!’ He moves heaven and earth to rescue her, because he knows that’s the script, and here I am, and right next to me is William Hurt, the slightly corrupt, guilty guy, still clinging to decency, but not sure if he wants to live or not and he’s put himself in this dangerous situation for…for what? Oh, there’s his mysterious girl, of course, but mainly it’s self-punishment, a need to have some major explosion to either wipe him out or blow him the hell out of his expensive unsatisfactory life. Stay tuned.”
“William Hurt. That’s not bad.”
“No, and when the gangsters get here, they’ll act like gangsters in the movies, or, and here’s a subtlety that’s not often used, they’ll act the opposite of movie gangsters. That’s the great thing about The Sopranos-movie gangsters pretending to be real gangsters watching movie gangsters and changing their style to be more like the fake ones, but the fact is, it really happens. The one thing you can be sure of is they’re not going to be authentic. There’s no authentic left.”
“Amalie is authentic,” said Mishkin, after a moment.
“Yeah, she is,” Crosetti agreed. “But Amalie’s unplugged from the culture, or maybe she’s plugged
into something else, God maybe. But it’s the exception that proves the rule, and notice, she’s not in this movie.”
“No, she’s not. But I’ll tell you one thing: you’re wrong about me. I don’t mean about my character, the William Hurt business, but about what I’m doing here. It’s not just a vague despair. It’s part of a plot.”
“Yeah, but that’s just what I’ve been say-”
“No, not a movie-type plot. A scheme, a device, a manipulation, so that the bad guys get theirs.”
“What is it? The plot, I mean.”
“I’m not going to tell you,” said Mishkin. “I’m going to reveal it when everyone gets here.”
“Jake, that’s the oldest dodge in the book. Will there be redemption by violence after?”
“I certainly hope so. Are you worried?”
“Not in the least. The John Cusack character has to escape and get the girl. You, on the other hand, might not make it.” He yawned vastly and added, “Shit, man, I mean this is fascinating but I’m falling over. It’ll be daylight in a couple of hours and I have to get some sleep. You look pretty beat yourself as a matter of fact.”
“I’ll be fine,” said Mishkin. “There are bedrooms galore upstairs, beds all made, rafts of cozy quilts: make yourself at home.”
He picked a bedroom with a view over the water, kicked off his boots, slipped under the quilt, went out in an instant; and awakened to the coughing roar of a large powerboat engine. He rolled out, scrubbed at his eyes, and went to the window. On the lake someone was inexpertly trying to dock a twenty-eight-foot Bayliner cruiser. They had the canvas top on and the plastic windshields rigged, but Crosetti figured it must still be fairly cold in a trailerable boat like that, designed for summer cruises. The snow had stopped, the sky was pearly bright, and a wind from the east whipped up small whitecaps. The unskilled pilot was trying to bring the boat into the west side of the dock, so of course the wind was blowing him away from it, the craft’s high profile acting as a sail, and he wasn’t giving the boat time to answer the helm, was also gunning the throttle, banging the prow against the dock and bouncing away. He should have just pulled back and gone around to the other side, where the wind would have bedded him up against the rubber fenders with no trouble. So thought Crosetti, who had spent every summer of his boyhood out on Sheepshead Bay with his parents and sisters and assorted cousins, packed dangerously into a twenty-two-foot rental.
The Book of Air and Shadows Page 48