The Book of Air and Shadows

8

Crosetti’s mother, Mary Margaret Crosetti (Mary Peg as she was universally known), possessed a number of personal characteristics useful for both a high-end research librarian and a mother, including a prodigious memory, a love of truth, a painstaking attention to detail, and an industrial-strength bullshit detector. Thus, while she tried to give her son the privacy suitable to the adult he was, the ordinary business of life in a smallish Queens bungalow produced enough mother-son interactions to give her a good idea of his interior state of being at any particular moment. Ten days ago this state had been extraordinarily fine. Al tended to the dour, but she recalled that for a day or so he sang in the shower and glowed from within. He’s in love, she thought, with the mingling of joy and trepidation that this perception raises in most parents, and then, shortly thereafter, came the crash. He’s been dumped, she concluded, and also that it was an unusually quick end to what had appeared to be an unusually intense joy.

“I’m worried about him,” she said on the telephone to her eldest daughter. “This is not like Albert.”

“He’s always getting dumped on, Ma,” said Janet Keene, who besides being her mother’s chief coconspirator was a psychiatrist. “He’s a nice guy with no smarts about women. It’ll pass.”

“You’re not here, Janet. He’s moving like a zombie. He comes home from work like he spent the day in the salt mines. He doesn’t eat, he goes to bed at eight-thirty-it’s not natural.”

“Well, I could see him…,” Janet began.

“What, as a patient?”

“No, Ma, that’s not allowed, but if you want a second opinion.”

“Look, darling, I know when my children are crazy and when not, and he’s not crazy-I mean not crazy crazy. What I’m going to do is this Saturday I’ll make a nice breakfast, I’ll sit him down, and I’ll get it out of him. What do you think?”

Janet, who in her wildest professional fantasies could hardly imagine having her mother’s ability to make people spill their guts, produced some noncommittal affirmative remarks. Affirmative remarks were what were required when Mary Peg called to ask for advice, and Janet did her duty. She thought the main thing her baby brother needed was a girl, a decent job, and to vacate his mother’s roof, in ascending order of importance, but she declined to pursue that line of argument. She and her two sisters had bailed out at the earliest opportunity: not that they didn’t dearly love their mother, but she cast a good deal of very dense shade. Poor Allie!

Mary Peg always felt better after soliciting professional advice from Janet and was pleased that this accorded so well with her own instincts. She was one of seven children of a subway motorman and, unusually for one of her class and culture, had succumbed to the lure of the ’60s and gone the whole countercultural route-rock band groupie, communard in California, a little drugging, some casual sex-and then the semishame-faced resumption of real life in the form of a B.A. from City College and an M.S. in library science. Her own parents had known nothing of the wilder part of this history, for she was not one of the many of that time who were naughty to get back at the folks; naughtiness for its own sake had been quite sufficient. But she had always felt a bracing Catholic guilt at deceiving them and had resolved, when she came to have children of her own, that intergenerational deception was not going to be part of the deal. She occasionally thought that this was why she had married a cop.

As planned, she presented the nice breakfast, her son shuffled up to the table, sipped some fresh orange juice, took a few forkfuls of French toast, and announced that thanks but he wasn’t really very hungry, at which point Mary Peg banged a teaspoon against a glass in a good imitation of a fire alarm. He jerked and stared.

“Okay, spill it, Buster!” she said, fixing him with her eyes, these being the color of gas flame and, just now, about as hot.

“What?”

“What, he says. You’ve been doing a scene from The Night of the Living Dead for nearly two weeks. You didn’t think I noticed? You’re a wreck.”

“It’s nothing, Ma…”

“It’s something. It’s that girl, what’s-her-name, Carol.”

“Carolyn.” Followed by a great sigh.

“Her. Now, you know I never pry into the personal lives of my children…”

“Ha.”

“Don’t be fresh, Albert!” And in a milder tone, “Seriously, I’m starting to worry about you. You’ve broken up with girls before but you never acted all weird like this.”

“It’s not a breakup, Ma. It’s not…I don’t know what it is. That’s the problem. I mean basically we had one date, very nice, but then she…I guess she sort of vanished.”

Mary Peg sipped coffee and waited, and in a few minutes the whole confused story came out, the convoluted tale of Rolly, and the manuscript, and Bulstrode. Her husband had described any number of interrogations to her, for he was not among the majority of police detectives who thought their spouses too tender to listen to cop stories; nor was she. This was how it was done, she knew, a sympathetic ear, an encouraging word. She was disturbed to learn that her son had abetted what an unsympathetic person might regard as a felony, nor did she like anything of what she heard about Ms. Rolly. But she declined comment; and now her son arrived at the period subsequent to their first date: he had not of course filled in the moister details, but she had the experience and imagination to provide these herself.

“Well, like I said, we had a nice time and I was feeling pretty good. I went to work the next day expecting to find her in the shop, but she wasn’t there. I asked Glaser and he said she’d called and said she had to go out of town for a couple of days. I thought that was a little peculiar, I mean I thought we had something going, that she would’ve called me, but like I said, she was a strange bird. So I was, you know, cool about it. Anyway, the day comes when she’s supposed to come back and no Carolyn. Mr. Glaser calls her-the phone’s disconnected, so now we’re a little freaked and I told him I’d go by after work and see what was up. And when I got to her street there was a big dump truck parked outside and a wrecking crew was all over her building. They were just finishing up for the day, but I could see they had set up one of those chutes that wreckers use to slide debris and stuff down to the Dumpster and it was stuck in her window on the top floor. I talked to the crew chief and he didn’t know anything. He’d gotten a call from the building management that they needed a rush job, the building had to be gutted down to the brick shell and made ready for renovation. I got the name of the management company from him but he wouldn’t let me go into the building. Like I told you, Carolyn had built all this furniture out of pallet boards, beautiful work, and there it was, all smashed up, her worktable and everything. It was like seeing her corpse.”

Crosetti seemed to shiver. He pushed French toast around with his fork.

“In any case, I couldn’t do anything there, and I was, like, totally stunned. I started to walk away and I noticed that the street and the sidewalk were strewn with scraps of paper. It was a windy day and I guess some of the lighter stuff had blown off the truck, or the wind had picked it up between the chute and the pile of trash in the truck. So like an idiot I went down the street bent over picking up stuff, thinking to myself, Oh, she’ll want this, this photograph, this postcard, whatever; stupid really, because she would’ve taken whatever she wanted.”

He took out his wallet and showed her a folded postcard, a folded photograph.

“Pathetic, right? Carrying this stuff around? It’s like magical thinking, if I hold on to something of hers, there’s still a connection, she hasn’t totally vanished…” He placed the items back in his wallet and looked so forlorn that Mary Peg had to control an atavistic urge to take him on her lap and kiss his brow. Instead she said, “What about these famous volumes? You think she took those?”

“I hope so. I didn’t see them. For all I know they were at the bottom of the truck. That’d be ironic, like the gold dust in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.”

That last made Mary Peg feel a little better; if he was making movie references, he couldn’t be that far gone. She said, “You called the building manager, of course.”

“Of course. I even went up to their offices. Able Real Estate Management, up near Borough Hall in Brooklyn. A receptionist who knew zip and a boss who was never in. When I finally got him on the phone, he said he didn’t know any Carolyn Rolly, and that the top floor had never been rented out as a residence, that it wasn’t certified for human occupancy in any case, which was why they were gutting the building. I asked him who owned the building and he said that was confidential. A consortium, he said. Then I called Professor Bulstrode, and the departmental secretary said he’d left for England the previous day and they weren’t sure when he’d be back. Visiting professors were more or less free to go where they pleased when they had no classes to meet and he didn’t. It was the summer. She wouldn’t give me his number in Oxford.”

He gave her a look so bleak that it zapped a little shock of pain through her heart. “I don’t know what to do, Ma. I think something happened to her. And somehow I think it’s my fault.”

“Well, that’s just nonsense. The only thing you did wrong was to go along with this scheme of hers. Look, I know you were fond of this girl, but why isn’t it likely that she simply absconded with her ill-gotten gains?”

“Ill-gotten gains? Ma, it’s not like she knocked over a liquor store. She was a bookbinder. She was fixing a beautiful set of books that their owner had given up for scrap. Glaser wouldn’t suffer a penny of loss-he only wanted the money he would’ve gotten from the sale of the prints…”

“Which he didn’t get, don’t forget.”

“Hey I’m not making excuses, but if she was a crook, she was a certain kind of crook. There was stuff she wouldn’t do, and bugging out like this and not giving Glaser what he had coming were in that zone. I mean, she was in the middle of a project that she really wanted to do, and…you didn’t see her place, but she’d created this whole little world in this crummy loft in Red Hook, I mean she’d built it with her own hands, it was her work space, and work was all she had. She never would’ve just ditched it.”

“I don’t know, darling: she seems like a very unpredictable young woman and almost…can I say ‘unstable’? I mean according to her she’s been horribly abused. And you said she was some kind of fugitive-maybe that caught up with her? You’re shaking your head.”

“No, and I’m not sure about the fugitive part either. I did a massive search on the Internet. You’d think an incident like a guy named Lloyd keeping a girl named Carolyn Rolly locked up for ten years as a sex toy would have generated some hits, but I came up blank. I called the Kansas City Star and the Topeka Capital-Journal and the Wichita Eagle a couple of other Kansas papers, and got zilch: nobody had ever heard of the case. Okay, she could’ve changed her name but still…so I called Patty.”

Mary Peg noted that her son’s face showed a tinge of embarrassment at this admission, as well it should have, she thought. Patrica Crosetti Dolan, the second eldest girl, had followed her dad into the New York City Police Department and risen to detective third grade. Members of the NYPD are not supposed to do little investigative tasks for their families, but many do anyway; Mary Peg had occasionally availed herself of her daughter’s connections in this way while doing research, had taken substantial flak off her son on the subject as a result, and now ha-ha!

She refrained from gloating, however, satisfying herself with a simple but freighted “Oh?”

“Yeah, I asked her to do a records check, whether she was a fugitive or not.”

“And…”

“She didn’t show up, not as Carolyn Rolly anyway.”

“You mean she lied? About the uncle and about being a fugitive?”

“I guess. What else could it be? And that’s what sort of knocked the stuffing out of me. Because…I mean I really liked this woman. It was chemical; you know, you and Dad always talked about the first time you saw each other when you were working behind the desk at the Rego Park Library and he used to come in for books. You just knew? It was like that.”

“Yeah, but, honey, that was mutual. I didn’t pack my bags and split after the first date.”

“I thought it was mutual too. I thought this was going to be it. And if it wasn’t, I mean if it was all something I cooked up in my head, then, well, where am I? I must be crazy.”

“Please, you are not any kind of maniac, take my word for it. I would be the first one to tell you if you were going off the rails. As I would expect you to do for me when senile dementia rears its ugly head.” She clapped her hands briskly, as if to demonstrate how very far off lay that event, and said, “Meanwhile, what are we going to do about this?”

“We?”

“Of course. Now, clearly, everything revolves around this Professor Bulstrode. What do we know about him?”

“Ma, what’re you talking about? What does Bulstrode have to do with Carolyn disappearing? He bought the papers, he split. End of story. Although I did run a search on him and he’s sort of a black sheep.” Here Crosetti explained about the famous quarto fraud, which, as it happens, she recalled.

“Oh, that guy,” she exclaimed. “Well, the plot thickens, doesn’t it? Now, the very first thing we have to do is get Fanny in on this, just like you should’ve done originally.” He stared at her blankly and she went on. “Albert, you don’t imagine that Bulstrode gave you the real translation of that thing! Of course he lied. You said your gut was telling you that you were getting rooked, and you wouldn’t have sold it to him if that woman hadn’t turned on the waterworks and told you those whoppers. They were in it together.”

“That’s impossible, Ma…”

“It’s the only explanation. She played you like a fish. I’m sorry, honey, but the fact is, we sometimes fall in love with unsuitable people, which is why Cupid carries a bow and arrows and not a clipboard with a stack of personality tests. I certainly did when I was a kid, and not just once.”

“For example,” said Crosetti with interest. His mother’s supposedly wild past was a subject of fascination to all her children, but one she only mentioned in the form of admonitory hints like this one. Her answer when questioned was invariably, as now, “That’s for me to know and you to find out.” She added, “In any case, my boy, I’ll call Fanny right now and set it up. You can see her after work on Monday.”

Against which Crosetti had no compelling argument. Thus at six that day he presented himself with the papers in their mailing tube at the manuscript department of the New York Public Library. He found Fanny Doubrowicz at her desk. She was a tiny woman, less than five feet tall, with a pleasantly ugly pug face and bright mahogany eyes, deep sunk behind thick round spectacles; her coarse gray hair was drawn back in a librarian’s bun, stuck with the canonical yellow pencil. She had come over as an orphan from Poland after the war and had been a librarian for over fifty years, most of them at the NYPL, specializing in manuscripts for the last twenty or so. Crosetti had known Aunt Fanny for his whole life and considered her the wisest person within his circle of aquaintance, although when complimented upon her encyclopedic brain, she always laughed and said, “Darling [or dolling], I know nothing [nozhing] but I know where to find everything.” When he was a child he and his sisters had tried to think of facts that would be impossible for Aunt Fanny to discover (how many bottles of Coke got sold in Ashtabula in 1928?), but she always defeated them and provided remarkable stories of how the information had been obtained.

So: greetings, questions about his sisters, his mother, himself (although Crosetti was sure she had been elaborately briefed on this by Mary Peg), and swiftly to business. He drew the pages out of the tube and handed over the roll. She carried them to a broad worktable and spread the sheets out in three long parallel rows, the copies of what he had sold Bulstrode and the retained originals.

When she had them spread out she uttered some startled words in what he supposed was Polish. “Albert, these eighteen sheets…they are originals?”

“Yeah, they’re what looks like enciphered letters. I didn’t sell them to Bulstrode.”

“And you are rolling them up like calendars? Shame on you!” She walked off and came back with clear plastic document envelopes, into which she carefully placed the enciphered sheets.

“Now,” she said. “Let us see what we have here.”

Doubrowicz looked at the copies for a long time, examining each sheet with a large rectangular magnifying glass. At last she said, “Interesting. You know there are three separate documents in all. These copies are of two different ones and these originals.”

“Yeah, I figured that part out. Those four sheets are obviously the printer’s copy of some sermons and I’m not interested in them. All the rest is the letter from this guy Bracegirdle.”

“Umm, and you sold this letter to Bulstrode, your mother said.”

“Yeah. And I’m sorry, Fanny, I should have come straight to you.”

“Yes, you should have. Your dear mother thinks you were cheated.”

“I know.”

She patted his arm. “Well, we shall see. Show me the part where you thought he mentioned Shakespeare.”

Crosetti did so, and the little librarian adjusted a goosenecked lamp to cast an intense beam at the bright paper and peered at it through her lens. “Yes, this seems a clear enough secretary hand,” she remarked. “I have certainly had to deal with worse.” She read the passage aloud slowly, like a dim third-grader, and when she reached the end exclaimed, “Dear God!”

“Shit!” cried Crosetti and pounded his fist into his thigh hard enough to sting.

“Indeed,” said Doubrowicz, “you have been well cogged and coney-catched, as our friend here would have said. How much did he pay you?”

“Thirty-five hundred.”

“Oh, dear me. What a shame!”

“I could have got a lot more, right?”

“Oh, yes. If you had come to me and we had established the authenticity of the document beyond any reasonable doubt-and for a document of this nature and importance, that in itself would have been a considerable task-then there’s no telling what it would have fetched at auction. We would probably not be in it, since it’s a little out of our line, but the Folger and the Huntington would have been in full cry. More than that, to someone like Bulstrode, having possession, exclusive possession, of something like this-why, it’s a career in itself. No wonder he cheated you! He must have seen immediately that this thing would place him back in the center of Shakespeare studies. No one would ever mention that unfortunate fake again. It would be like an explosion opening up an entirely fresh field of scholarship. People have been arguing for years about Shakespeare’s religion and his political stance and here we find an official of the English government suspecting him not only of papistry but papistry of a potentially treasonous nature. Then you have a whole set of research lines to explore: this Bracegirdle fellow, his history, who he knew, where he traveled, and the history of the man he worked for, this Lord D. Perhaps there are files in some old muniment room that no one has ever explored. And since we know that Shakespeare was never actually prosecuted, we would want to know why not, was he protected by someone even more powerful than Lord D.? And on and on. Then we have a collection of enciphered letters apparently describing a spy’s observation of William Shakespeare, an actual detailed contemporary record of the man’s activities-an unimaginable treasure in itself, assuming they can be deciphered, and believe me, cryptographers will be fighting with sticks to get hold of them. But at least we have these in original.”

Doubrowicz leaned back in her chair and stared up at the coffered ceiling, fanned herself dramatically with her hand, and laughed her sharp little bark. It was a gesture familiar to Crosetti from his childhood, when the children had brought what they imagined was an utterly insolvable puzzle. “But, my dear Albert, all that, enticing as it is, is mere trivia compared to the real prize.”

Crosetti felt his throat dry up. “You mean that an autograph manuscript might still exist.”

“Yes, and not just that. Let me see, does he give a date anywhere?” She lifted her magnifier and cast over the sheets, like a bird seeking a scurrying bug. “Hm, yes, here is one, 1608, and here, ah yes, he seems to have begun his spying career around 1610. Do you understand the significance of that date, Albert?”

“Macbeth?”

“No, no, Macbeth was 1606. And we know how it came to be written and there were no secret Bracegirdles involved. The year 1610 was the year of The Tempest, and after that, except for some small things, collaborations and the like, Shakespeare wrote no more plays, and that means…”

“Oh, God, it’s a new play!”

“An unknown, unrecorded, unsuspected play by William Shakespeare. In autograph.” She placed her hand on her chest. “My heart. Darling, I think I am a little too old for this kind of excitement. In any case, if genuine, I say again, if genuine, well…you know we say ‘priceless’ very easily nowadays, by which we mean very expensive, but this would be truly in a class by itself.”

“Millions?”

“Pah! Hundreds…hundreds of millions. The manuscript alone, if proved authentic, would be certainly the most valuable single manuscript, perhaps the most valuable portable object, in the world, on a par with the greatest paintings. And then, whoever owned the manuscript would have the copyright too. I am not an expert here but that would be my guess. Theatrical productions-every director and producer on earth would be selling their children for the right to mount the premiere, and don’t even mention films! On the other hand, lest we build too high a castle in the air, the whole thing could be an elaborate fraud.”

“A fraud? I don’t get it-who’s defrauding who?”

“Well, you know Bulstrode was caught once by a clever forger. Perhaps they thought he was ripe for another try.”

“Really? I’d think he’d be the last person to go to. Who’d believe him? The whole point is that his credibility is shot, that’s why he’s so desperate to recoup.”

She laughed. “You should go up to Foxwood sometimes, to the casino. If those who lost heavily did not desperately try to recoup, as you put it, they would have to close their doors. Of course, were I a villain, I would not attempt such a scheme.”

“Why not?”

“Because, darling, how would you create the prize? The play itself? It is one thing to forge a bad quarto of Hamlet. We have Hamlet and we have bad quartos and we have some idea of Shakespeare’s sources for the play. And the text does not have to possess any particular quality. In parts it need not even make sense; bad quartos often do not. You know what a bad quarto is, yes? Good, so you must realize that here it is entirely different. Here you must invent an entire play by the greatest dramatic poet who ever lived, and who was then at the height of his powers. It can’t be done. Someone tried it already once, you know.”

“Who tried it?”

“A silly little fellow named William Henry Ireland, back in the eighteenth century. His father was a scholar, and Willie wanted to impress him, so he started finding documents related to Shakespeare in old trunks. Completely ludicrous, but with the state of analysis and scholarship that then was, many people were taken in. Well, nothing would do but that he had to find a new play by Shakespeare, and he did, an abortion he called Vortigern, and Kemble produced it at the Drury Lane Theatre. It was howled off the stage, naturally. Meanwhile the great scholar Malone had exposed all the other manuscripts as fraudulent and the whole thing collapsed. Now, Ireland was a dullard and easily exposed. Pascoe, the man who tricked Bulstrode, was a good deal smarter, but what we’re talking about is of another order. It could not be a mere pastiche, you see: it would have to be Shakespeare, and he is dead.”

“So you think it’s the real deal.”

“This I cannot say without examining the original. In the meantime, I will type out for you a Word document from this Bracegirdle’s letter so you will not have to learn Jacobean secretary hand and you can read what he has to say. Also, I will prepare another Word document based on these supposed enciphered letters so at least you can see what the ciphertext looks like. If you don’t mind, I would like to keep the letters here and run some elementary tests on them. If they are not genuine seventeenth century, of course, we can all have a good laugh and forget the whole thing. In fact, I will do that first, and if they prove genuine I will send to you the two documents by e-mail, and also I will give you the name of a man I know who is interested in ciphers and such things. If we can generate a solution, it gives us a bit of bargaining against Bulstrode. For he has not got these, and they may hold information about the location of the autograph play, do you see?”

Crosetti did. He said, “Thanks, Fanny. I feel like such a jerk.”

“Yes, but as I say all is perhaps not lost. I will be happy to meet this Bulstrode and tell him what I think of his sly tricks. Let me begin with the transcription of the cipher first. It should not take too long. Will you stay?”

“No, I have to get back to work. I don’t know a lot about crypto but maybe it’s a simple substitution. They couldn’t have been all that sophisticated back then.”

“Oh, I think you would be surprised. There are ciphers in French of the ancien régime that have never been broken. Still, we could be lucky.”

“Who’s this cipher expert you mentioned?”

“Oh, Klim? He is a Polish person too, but a more recent immigrant. He was a cryptanalyst with the WSW in Warsaw, that is, military counterintelligence. Now he drives a hearse. If you leave me alone now, I will have this done in a little bit. And don’t feel too bad about yourself, Albert. There was a woman involved, after all, and you are still young.”

Feeling as old as Fanny, however, Crosetti slumped out of the library and took the Madison bus uptown to the bookstore. There was a new woman working there, Pamela, this one genuinely ex-Barnard: short, earnestly intellectual, attractive, well-turned out, engaged to someone on Wall Street. It was as if Carolyn Rolly had never been, except that occasionally Glaser would mention that she had vanished without telling him what she had done with the prints from the Churchill Voyages. When Crosetti entered the shop today, however, Glaser hailed him and ushered him into the little office he kept in the rear of the shop.

“You’ll be interested to know that Rolly has surfaced,” Glaser announced. “Take a look at this.”

He handed Crosetti a brown envelope with the slick crinkly feel that announced it as foreign. It had a British stamp and a London postmark. Inside Crosetti found a letter written in Rolly’s beautiful italic hand, black ink on heavy cream paper. He felt his face grow hot and a pang darted down his center, and he had to restrain himself from raising the paper to his nostrils and sniffing it. He read:

Dear Sidney,

Please forgive me for leaving you in the lurch like this, and for not contacting you to let you know what I was doing. Since I didn’t know when the shop would reopen, I thought it would not be too much of a burden on you and would give you sufficient time to find a replacement. But I was rude not to call you earlier and I am sorry. What happened was that I was called away to London on urgent family business, which then turned into a career opportunity, so it looks like I will be staying here in the UK indefinitely.

The good news, from your perspective, is that I was able to sell the maps and plates from the broken Churchill for what I believe was a far higher price than we would have received on the American market-3,200 British pounds! They seem to have an insatiable appetite here for good-quality prints from their glory days. I enclose an international money order for $5,712.85. I paid the various fees out of my pocket, to make up for any inconvenience you might have suffered.

Do say good-bye to Mrs. Glaser for me and to Albert. You’ve all been far kinder to me than I deserved.

Best,

Carolyn Rolly

Crosetti handed the letter back with lead in his belly. He had to clear his throat heavily before saying, “Well. Good for her. I didn’t know she had family in England.”

“Oh, yes,” Glaser replied. “She once mentioned that the name was originally Raleigh, as in Sir Walter, and she implied that there was some connection to the famous one. Maybe she inherited the family castle. That’s quite a sale, anyway. I always figured our Carolyn was heading for higher things than bookstore clerking. Did you print out those auction notices I wanted?”

“This morning. They should be in your in-box.”

Glaser nodded, grunted an acknowledgment, and walked off, and Crosetti clumped down the stairs to his cave. It was a more pleasant work environment than it had been before the fire, for the insurance had paid for a complete renovation, including neat steel shelves and a new Dell computer with all the latest stuff attached. The cellar now smelled of paint and tile adhesive instead of dust and cooking grease, but the improvement did not noticeably help Crosetti’s mood. Each time “How could she?” appeared in his mental theater, the answer came swiftly: “Schmuck! You had one date. What did you expect, love forever? She got a better deal and split.” On the other hand, there was Crosetti’s devout belief that the body never lied, and he could not accept that Rolly had lied to him in that way, that one night. She was a liar, sure, but he could not accept that sort of falsehood. Why should she? To repay him for a nice evening? It made no sense.

And speaking of lies, went the inner voice, that letter was complete horseshit. We know she didn’t break those volumes, therefore didn’t sell the prints. He was as sure of that as he was about the honesty of the flesh. So where did she get the nearly six grand she paid out to Glaser? Answer: someone supplied it, plus the costs of travel to England, and for this the only suspect was Professor Bulstrode, for there was no one else on the scene who both had that sort of money and was in England. She had gone to England with Bulstrode. But why? Kidnapped? No, that was absurd: professors of English did not kidnap people except in the sort of preposterous movies that Crosetti despised. Then why did she go?

Two possibilities presented themselves, one unpleasant, one frightening. The unpleasant possibility was that Carolyn saw the opportunity for a big score, the possibility of actually finding the supposed Shakespeare treasure. She’d read Bracegirdle’s letter and called Bulstrode behind Crosetti’s back (that long wait outside her loft!), set up the sale of the Bracegirdle manuscript, pressured Crosetti to sell, and then-he wanted to think-fallen a little in love but not quite enough to make her willing to miss the opportunity to get out of a life of crushing poverty.

The frightening possibility was that she was acting under duress, that Bulstrode had something on her, a threat far worse than just losing her clerk’s job and having to deal with the cops. No, that was another lie-the cops were not after any Carolyn Rolly, not according to his sister anyway. But maybe it was a little of both, a carrot and a stick. He had to have new information. Information was what allowed you to separate the lies from the truth.

As soon as this thought appeared, Crosetti swiveled in his chair and faced his new computer. He actually did have some new information, and because of the moping he’d been doing lately he hadn’t thought to use it. From the back pocket of his jeans he extracted the two items he had scooped from the street outside Carolyn’s former home. The photograph was a one-hour-photo print of two women and two children, a boy of four or so and a baby girl. One of the women was a younger Carolyn Rolly, with her hair jammed up under a feed cap, and the other woman was a pretty blonde. They were sitting on a bench in some kind of park or playground, in summer sunshine, the trees around them, heavy with leaf, throwing dark shadows on the ground. They were looking at the photographer and smiling, with the sun in their faces making them squint slightly. It was not a good photograph; Crosetti knew that the cheap instant camera it was taken with could not deal with the contrast between bright sun and shade, and so the faces were washed out, especially those of the kids. But Carolyn had kept it and then walked away from it, as if abandoning her life once again. He studied the silvery faces, looking for signs of family connections, but again there was too little information.

He scanned the photograph into the computer, called up PhotoShop, and played with the contrast for a while, and then downloaded a program he’d used before that enhanced just such photos, using statistical methods. The result was a better look at the family, because now it was clear that it was a family. This had to be Carolyn’s sister, or at least a first cousin, and the two kids were clearly related to either or both of the women. Crosetti could not have said exactly why he knew this, but he was from a large family, and from a social and ethnic stratum where large families were common, and the fact was instinctively clear to him.

The picture on the postcard bore the legend CAMP WYANDOTTE done in what was supposed to look like birch sticks, and depicted a fir-lined mountain lake, a dock, and some boys canoeing. The message side had a three-year-old postmark and said, in childish block printing: Dear Mommy Im haveing a good time at camp. We catched a snake. I love you Emmett. It was addressed, in an adult hand, to Mrs. H. Olerud, 161 Tower Rd., Braddock PA 16571.

Turning to the computer, Crosetti generated a map of the address, which turned out to be in western Pennsylvania, near Erie. He used Google-Earth on the address and brought up the roof of a modest frame house with outbuildings, surrounded by scrubby woodlands. Zooming out from that image showed a semirural neighborhood like those that surround the smaller, tired towns of the American Rust Belt: five-acre plots, broken cars and appliances in the yards, woodpiles: scruffy zones inhabited by people who used to have good manufacturing or mining employment and now barely got by on sporadic work or McJobs. Did this milieu spawn the exotic creature that was Rolly? He looked again at the photograph of the two women and the kids at the playground and wished that he were thirty years in the future when Google (he was sure) would let you google the interiors of all the houses and study the faces of all the inhabitants of the planet. At present, however, a journey would be required.

BRACEGIRDLE LETTER (8)

We crost the seas with fayre windes until 23^rd July when the skye came all over black as night & commense a greate wind. The fleete wase scattered entirelie & oure ship drave upon a rock & wracked but through the mercie of God none perished save three men & Mr Tolliver one of them, may God have mercie on his sowle & now is all his quizzing done for he seeth face to face. When the storm abates wee had greate feare for wee find we are upon the Bermoothes, which all mariners dight Isle of Devils, for dwelleth salvages there that eate mens fleashe or soe twas thought. But we landed having no other choyce & found not salvages but a place near to Paradise, waters, meadowes, fruite trees &c. with pleasaunt flowered aires most swete. Was good cedern timber abounding too & wee set to building two boates fit to carry all o’ wee & passed there near one yeare before sayling & I gayne greate credit for steeryng by starres and Sun & did arrive with the Lords holpe at Jamestown 23rd Maye the Yeare Ten. All this tale has been tolde before in bookes wrote by Mr Wm Strachey of oure partie which you have read, soe I will saye no more of this.

Now returning to England on the first ship landeing Plymouth 6^th July & wisht to goe to London for I desyred to turn my bill to gold coyne at some Jewes counting-house & shew youre father that I wase a fit man to have my deare Nan. Soe I did takeing boat next daye & found my Jewe and walked in my pryde with a heavie purse; but comeing thereafter to the Iron Man Inn & askeing wase told that some moneths before this thou wast wed to Thomas Finch fishmonger of Puddyng Lane.

Then was my heart sore for I had lade all my hopes on that marriage, haveing mee now no familie nor friendes nor home: & besydes Mr Tollivers fancies had worne to nubbin my olde faith in the pure religione & knew not what to think but considered I wase likely damned to Hell & did not cayre, or not much. Thus are sowles lost. Yet I had gold: & friendes of a sorte can always be got if you have it, so roistered many weekes Nan, I would I had not nor will I saye what foul thynges I did doe in that passage but awoke one morn in Plymouth in a trulls bedde & 2s. 3d. was all I had in purse. Now among my fellowe sottes there wase one Cranshaw who called hymself a gentleman of the coste, which interpreted is a smuckler & he says you are a stout fellow Dick & know the shiftes, come we wille grow rich together with bringeing in canary, sacke & other goodes from sea. Soe we did for some time. But that Cranshaw was as fond of drinking sacke as selling it & worked so ill & clumsy, boasting in tavernes & the lyke that one night the coste guardes took us & clapped us bothe in fetteres & soe caste in the Tower.

There Mr Hastynges kindlie came & visited me & he says lad you are for the rope sure nothynge can save thee, caught with uncustommed goodes: what foole thou-why camest thee not to mee, shall I denie thee worke? And I was sore ashamed to be brought so low. Yet I commenced to praye agaen which I had not for soe long & it did me confort, methoughte Gods mercie mayhap wold save e’en one such as mee, for Christ came to save sinners not the righteous.

Now Nan you knew all this or almost all, and twas for younge Richard I have wrote it out so I may speake fatherly to hym from the Grave: but now I shall tell what no man knowes except they were there & I alone yet live. Of a morn, mee lying in filthie straws in chaynes & thinking of how many better than I wast once so enchayned for Gods sake and wishing I was one of theyre number instod of what I wase a kynde of robbinge knave, there comes a warder saying, here rise & he unshackels mee & bringeth water to washe and attend my bearde and new cloathes. Soe he beckones & I must followe. Thus to a small roome in the White Tower, new rushes on the floore and a good fyre, tabel and chayres and meate upon the tabel & canary in cuppes & a man there, a stranger saying sit, eate.