Only another moment or two now, he thought.
Unconsciousness was coming to greet him like a smothering embrace. He beat it back with his mind, as if swatting away crows, and squinted down the side of the fridge.
There was a broom, one of those old-fashioned long-handled affairs with a head of plaited grass, just like the one his parents had had.
He reached for it, first with his imagination, then with his left hand. He couldn’t reach, and had to shift inch by inch, hunching his back up and to the right like a dying sidewinder. He stretched out his hand again, but he was still inches short.
Not much longer now.
He squirmed and stretched again, and this time his splayed fingers caught the coarse bristles of the broom and brought it crashing down on top of him. The handle hit the tile like the popping of a champagne cork.
Not dead yet.
Bracing the tip of the handle with his lifeless right hand, he used his left to poke the brush head up to the counter. He shoved it hard, stabbing it upward like a spear. Nothing happened. He tried again. Still nothing. He yelled, and thrust it again.
This time he heard the clatter of the phone as it fell to the tiled floor. He flailed his left hand, grabbed it, and pushed the talk button. With what little concentration he could still muster he squeezed blindly at the keypad, mouthing as he did so, “Nine. One. One.”
He mashed the receiver to his head and listened, his eyes clamped shut. When he heard a voice, he managed “Twelve forty-seven Sycamore,” before slipping into unconsciousness.
CHAPTER 18
“I hate to say I told you so,” said Polinski, considering the hospital room approvingly.
“No, you don’t,” said Thomas. His chest was strapped and it was hard to speak.
“You’re right, I don’t,” she said, shrugging. “Was it Escolme?”
Thomas shook his head, felt a shot of pain in his shoulder, and said, “No.”
“You sure?” said the policewoman. “You said he was wearing night vision goggles.”
“I guess not,” Thomas conceded. He lifted his head from the pillow cautiously. “I don’t think it was him. It was dark for a lot of the time and then . . .”
He shrunk away from the memory. Polinski nodded, her thin lips pursed.
“Was it the same guy who attacked you outside the night before?”
“Couldn’t say,” said Thomas. “I’d say no, but that’s a guess.”
“Based on what?”
“The shoes,” he said. “The guy who came the previous night—assuming it was a guy—was wearing shoes that made a little ringing noise when he walked. This other guy didn’t.”
“Could have changed them.”
“Yes, but the two attacks felt different. One came with these noisy shoes and ran away as soon as he heard me—till I jumped on him and got my clock cleaned, that is. The other came with all this stealth gear and a gun. Either it was a different person or he came with a very different agenda.”
“He was white?”
“I think so,” said Thomas.
“Could you say anything about his height, build?”
Thomas began to shake his head again and caught himself before the pain kicked in.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Medium, I guess. Not heavyset, probably athletic, maybe six foot or just under, but I couldn’t be sure. A little smaller than me but at least as strong.”
He had been confined to the Evanston hospital for two days. For the first he had been unconscious and had had surgery to remove the fragments of the .38-caliber bullet that had fractured his collarbone and then bounced around inside. They had drained his lungs of blood with a chest tube that was still in place and put him on a cocktail of IV fluids. The knife wound in his arm had been stitched and bandaged. Throughout, they had kept his recovery room under guard, as if he might still be a target. Or a suspect. Thomas wasn’t sure which.
“So you believe me now?” he said to Polinski. “About Escolme? The Drake? The Shakespeare play?”
She smiled, a tiny quivering of one corner of her mouth.
“You know that Meat Loaf song,” she said. “ ‘Two out of Three Ain’t Bad’?”
“Not really a Meat Loaf fan,” said Thomas. “Which two?”
“Let’s just say it will be a while before I start quoting Shakespeare in a homicide report,” she said.
Thomas grinned.
She cocked her head to one side.
“You think that’s what he was looking for, don’t you?” she said. “That lost play.”
“It’s the only thing that would connect two attacks at the same address in as many nights,” said Thomas. “I just don’t know why anyone thinks I have it. Unless they think Escolme gave it to me, then faked the theft.”
“He faked other things,” said Polinski. “But if it wasn’t him crawling around your house with his night vision goggles and his personal armory, then he’s attracted the attention of some people who won’t be too happy when they find out that this priceless book . . .”
“Play,” Thomas corrected.
“Play,” Polinski repeated, “is lost or—more likely—never existed.”
Thomas sighed.
“When can I go home?” he said.
“Not my department. But I’d think they’d want to keep you in another couple of days.”
“Could someone contact the principal at Evanston Township? There are papers I could be grading.”
“Your classes have already been reassigned,” said Polinski.
“I’m perfectly capable of grading a few . . .”
“Relax,” said Polinski. “You restaged the gunfight at the O.K. Corral in your living room and you got shot. Even a workaholic like you should realize that’s grounds for taking a break.”
“Till when?”
“Fall,” she answered, smiling.
“Fall?” Thomas bellowed, sitting up in spite of his strapped shoulder, so that the word turned into a pained groan.
“The semester’s virtually over.” Polinski shrugged.
“It’s my damn job!” said Thomas. “I’ve been with those kids all year . . .”
“Get over yourself,” the cop said, standing. “Other teachers can get them through final exams.”
She was right, of course, but the truth still smarted, and Thomas lay back down grumbling. He wondered if his students would miss him. They liked him, most of them. Part of it was that he had acquired a certain notoriety—something that would be fed by getting shot—and part of it was that he cared about his subject in ways that sometimes made them care too. Whether that made him good at his job, he couldn’t say. Getting excited about a plot development in a Dickens novel or a phrase in Shakespeare had little to do with their SAT scores, after all.
“I’m Thomas Knight,” he said on the first day of class, “and I love books.”
It was supposed to be a bit of a joke, a familiar parody of AA meetings and twelve-step programs. He hoped that—by the end of his course—some of them would catch something of his enthusiasm. Thomas was just hopeful, old-fashioned, or naïve enough—he wasn’t sure which—to think that mattered.
They had sent get-well cards through the principal, but it was hard to tell if they missed him. Thomas was surprised to find that he wanted them to.
That’s maudlin, he thought, and vain.
“Just so you know,” said Polinski, “we’ve been watching your house since the shooting.”
“And?”
“Nothing. A couple of security companies came to scope the place out, give you an estimate. You’ll find the paperwork waiting for you when you get home. Still,” she added, “putting an alarm in now . . . Seems a bit like locking the barn door after the horse has . . .”
“Been shot?” Thomas completed for her. “Yes.”
She laughed.
“Will you, you know, continue to watch the house after I go home?” Thomas asked, trying to sound like he didn’t really care.
“For a
few days at least, yes.”
He nodded. She turned to leave.
“Did I hit him?” he said. “The intruder. I fired twice.”
She gave him an odd look.
“Are you hoping you did?” she said.
The question, and the seriousness in her eyes, gave him pause. In the silence she just shook her head.
“You’re going to have some work to do when you get home,” she said. “We took a couple of nine-millimeter slugs out of the wall.”
“Great.”
“No gun, by the way,” she added.
“What?”
“You said there were two guns, the one he shot you with and the one you redecorated the hallway with. We looked but we found neither.”
“It should have been right there where I left it before I crawled into the kitchen. I could show you the spot . . .”
“It’s not there,” she said, and she looked serious again. “We figure he came back for it, probably before the ambulance arrived.”
“While I was lying there unconscious?”
“Seems so.”
The thought was strangely unsettling. Had the guy thought he was dead? If not, why had he left him alive?
“Bye, Thomas,” said Polinski. “Try not to get into trouble.”
Thomas considered the hospital room.
“Fat chance,” he said.
CHAPTER 19
After she had gone, Thomas lay lost in thought for fifteen minutes. He had forgotten to mention to her the note he had left for Escolme. He wished he hadn’t written it. It had been a momentary petulance, followed up on because he had felt manipulated and deceived. The funny thing was that even though the shooting made it doubly clear just how much trouble Escolme had put him in, it also suggested that unless his former student was the villain Polinski suspected him to be, then the kid—Thomas still thought of him in those terms—was probably in real danger. And if Blackstone’s killer hadn’t known Escolme’s name before, there was a reasonable chance that Thomas’s pissy little note had changed that.
He reached painfully for the phone and made a series of calls that eventually connected him with the concierge at the Drake. He gave a false name, said he was attached to the Evanston Police Department and was just checking something that had already been clarified.
“Shoot,” said the concierge.
“I can’t read my own writing,” said Thomas. “Was Miss Daniella Blackstone staying in room 304 or 307?”
“In 304. Never had a chance to check out. Not till she—you know—checked out.”
“Thanks,” said Thomas. “That’s what I figured.”
He was about to hang up when another idea came to him.
“You couldn’t connect me to the room of Randall Dagenhart, could you?” he asked.
There was a pause, and then the concierge said, “Mr. Dagenhart already checked out.”
“What about Miss Julia . . .” He searched for the last name. “McBride.”
“Hold on.”
The phone rang three times before a woman’s voice answered. She sounded rushed, and for a moment Thomas wasn’t sure it was her.
“This is Thomas Knight,” he said. “We met in the bar at the Drake.”
“The recovering academic,” she said, instantly composed. “I remember. I’m impressed.”
“Why’s that?”
“I didn’t think I’d been obvious enough to encourage your call.”
Thomas found himself blushing.
“Oh,” he said. “Right. Well, I just wondered if I could ask you a question.”
“And it’s not going to be whether I’d like wine with dinner,” she said, amused by his embarrassment. “Ah well. What’s on your mind, Mr. Knight?”
“This lost Shakespeare play,” he said, composing himself and adjusting his posture, trying to find a position that hurt less when he spoke. “Love’s Labour’s Won. You said it would be a big deal if it was found, but you didn’t say whether you thought that likely.”
“That it has been or could be?”
“Either.”
“It’s possible,” she said.
“But do we even know it existed?”
“Debatable,” she said, shedding her playfulness and turning professorial. “But almost certainly, yes.”
“But it wasn’t one of the plays published in the 1623 folio.”
The First Folio was the first “collected” Shakespeare, compiled seven years after his death by members of the theater company for whom Shakespeare had worked. It contained thirty-six plays, half of which had not appeared in print before.
“No, it wasn’t in the Folio,” said McBride. “But then neither was Pericles, even though it had been published in quarto several times by then.”
Quartos were small, cheap single-play editions.
“And it wasn’t published in quarto either, right?” said Thomas.
“Well there’s the rub,” she said. “You’ve heard of Francis Meres?”
Thomas was about to say that he had never heard of him and then something came to him, something he remembered.
“A list,” he said. “He wrote a list of which playwrights were famous and what for, right?” said Thomas.
“Meres wrote a book called Palladis Tamia, or Wits Treasury , in 1598,” said the Shakespearean. “A tedious ramble through Meres’s views on art, poetry, and pretty much everything else. 1598 was the midpoint of Shakespeare’s career, pretty much. Meres lists six of his comedies, thereby providing good evidence for their dates of composition. They are The Comedy of Errors, Two Gentlemen of Verona, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merchant of Venice, Love’s Labour’s Lost, and . . .”
“Love’s Labour’s Won,” Thomas completed for her, propping himself on his left elbow and wincing as he did so. “But . . . some of the plays have alternate titles, right? Like Twelfth Night, which is also called What You Will. So isn’t it possible that Meres was just using a different name for one of the other plays that Shakespeare had written by 1598 but that isn’t on the list? A play we already know?”
“Like The Taming of the Shrew?” she said. “A nasty, masculinist assumption, Mr. Knight. You surprise me.”
“What do you mean?”
“Shrew should be on the list. It was definitely written by 1598, but Meres doesn’t mention it. Some people think Shrew is Love’s Labour’s Won. Love’s Labour’s Lost is about men being deprived of their romantic conquests by death and politics. The Taming of the Shrew is about beating your wife into submission . . .”
“Well, I’m not sure I’d agree . . .”
“From a certain perspective,” she inserted, amused, “it’s about winning a woman by breaking her spirit. If that’s Love’s Labour’s Won, then we’re all in trouble. Anyway, your scholarship is out of date, Mr. Knight.”
Thomas, who wasn’t aware that anything he’d said so far could be called scholarship of any period, listened.
“In 1953, a fragment of manuscript was found inside the binding of a book. Turns out to be part of an inventory from a stationer’s shop in Exeter. It listed what they were selling between the ninth and the seventeenth of August 1603. It included both The Taming of a Shrew and Love’s Labour’s Won. You can quibble over the A Shrew/ The Shrew discrepancy, if you like, but I think it pretty clear that Love’s Labour’s Won was a different play. And—more to the point—Mr. Knight, it was published.”
“Then how could it get lost?”
“There are probably others,” she said. “Two Noble Kins-men was also left out of the first folio. By then, Shakespeare was dead and the Globe had burned down. Who knows how many other manuscripts were lost?”
“But you aren’t talking about a handwritten manuscript,” Thomas insisted. “You are talking about a play that was published in quarto, which means there must have been hundreds floating around. How could it get lost?”
“You know how many extant copies of the first quarto of Titus Andronicus there are?” said McBride. “One. Plays wer
e penny-a-piece throwaways. They weren’t high art, they weren’t even poetry. We know that there’s at least one other play Shakespeare wrote—Cardenio—that we don’t have, though a manuscript might have survived till 1808 when the Covent Garden Theatre library burned.
“In the early seventeenth century Shakespeare wasn’t the literary icon he is today. He was just a writer, a populist writer at that, who wrote entertainments for the stage. He was good at it and made a ton of money doing it, but the finest writer the world has ever seen, an artist whose every scribbling should be preserved like a sacred relic? Hardly.”
“Then how could it have survived at all?” said Thomas, switching tack.
“There, Mr. Knight,” she said, and the flirtation was back so that he thought she might be reclining, chocolate martini in hand, “you have me.”
CHAPTER 20
Thomas spent two more days in his hospital bed, flipping through TV channels and periodically screaming at the stupidity of what he saw there till the pain in his shoulder made him sit back and shut up, and then he announced he was going home. The presiding physician, a hawkish, middle-aged man with keen eyes and a nasal voice, said he’d rather keep him in for a couple more days, but that going home now wouldn’t kill him.
“Good enough,” said Thomas. “There’s only so much daytime TV a man can take.”
“You could read a book,” said the doctor. “People still do.”
“My hordes of friends and well-wishers forgot to bring me one,” said Thomas.
Other than the police he had had only one visitor, Peter the Principal from school, who had poked his head around the door looking embarrassed behind flowers and a large card signed by the kids. Thomas didn’t have a lot of friends, but considering where he had been a little over a year ago, the drink, the loss of his job, and other, darker moments, he thought he was doing pretty well. He read through the names scribbled on the card and grinned.
He had called Kumi to say hello the previous day and had, somehow, and for reasons he couldn’t clearly identify, said nothing about what had happened.
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