The Book of Air and Shadows (51 page)

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 Israeli,” 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 meeting 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.

O
n 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.

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.”