The Book of Air and Shadows

11

Someone once said, Paul Goodman I think, that stupidity was a character defense and had little to do with intelligence, one reason the so-called best and brightest got us into Vietnam and why people who are smart enough to accumulate huge piles of wealth persist in doing things that get them major jail time. Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens, as, reportedly, my maternal grandmother used to say, quoting Schiller: against stupidity the gods themselves struggle in vain. In any case, it was stupid to tell my son about the gangsters and then my wife-no wait, the font of the stupidity was not immediately surrendering the Bracegirdle manuscript, after which no gangster would have had any interest in me or mine.

As I’ve said, Amalie is ordinarily of saintly mien, but like Our Lord when confronted with hypocrisy or injustice she has the ability to generate anger sufficient to wither fig trees. After she had wormed the whole tale out of me, in horrible little snips mixed with futile lies, I got the full blast of it, such that the resources of even her perfectly fluent English for insulting my intelligence were exhausted and she had to switch over to German: saudumm, schwachsinnig, verblödet, verkorkst, vertrottelt, voll abgedreht, and dumm wie die Nacht finster sein, to recall just a few. German is rich in such expletives, and they often filled the air of my childhood home. “Stupid as the night is dark” was in fact one of Mutti’s favorites. Finally: du kotzt mich an, which is quite vulgar and means roughly, “you make me puke.” With that, I was out on the street. I had received the reaming in near silence, conscious of a perverse pleasure in having at last violated the holy patience of my spouse. I called Rashid, he arrived in minutes, he stepped out to open the door for me (something that Omar has been told not to bother with), and I noticed he was looking upward and I did too as Paphiopedilum hanoiensis came flying from the top floor of Amalie’s house, just missing my car and smashing its new pot on the street. I had made her both angry and violent-a good night’s work and another down payment on my condo in Hell.

That, as it turned out, was the best part of the evening. After Rashid dropped me off and I stuck my key in the street door I noticed that it swung open before I’d had a chance to turn the lock. Someone had jammed the latch with a bit of duct tape. Heart in mouth I raced up the flights. The door to my loft hung open. Inside, in the narrow hallway that leads to the bedrooms, I found Omar. He was on his hands and knees groaning and seemingly examining a bright red oval on the polished oak floor, for blood was dripping down either side of his face from a wound in the back of his shaved skull. I lifted him up and into an armchair and obtained a clean dishcloth, a basin of water, and a bag of ice from the kitchen. When I had the wound washed and the bleeding under control, I asked him what had happened. I recall feeling an unnatural calm as I sat there listening to his groggy mumbles-in Arabic to begin with-a calm that recalled my army days as a medic, when the wounded were unloaded in large numbers from the dust-off helicopters after a firefight: the first moment you wanted to run away screaming and then came the unnatural calm that enabled you to work on mangled boys. I wanted to run screaming now through my loft to see what had happened to Miranda, but I made myself sit and ask and listen. There was not much to tell. He had heard a woman’s shout and a heavy thump and come running in from the living room where he had been watching cable news. That’s all he remembered. He didn’t see anyone. Miranda, of course, was gone, as was the original of the Bracegirdle manuscript.

I found Detective Murray’s card in my wallet and called him and left an urgent message and then dialed 911. After this we had the sort of confused interaction of many strangers, of the sort that’s always cut away in television dramas about crime and emergency, but which in real life absorbs many frustrating hours. Paramedics removed Omar, although he insisted upon walking down the stairs under his own power, and I entertained the police, first a pair of uniformed officers and then a pair of detectives, Simoni and Harris. They examined the front door of my loft and declared that the lock showed signs of picking, which made the affair more serious, not so much a domestic thing, which is what I imagined they thought when they arrived-a bleeding man, a missing woman, rich people, unholy liaisons…still, they couldn’t keep the snarkiness out of their voices. I imagined they were searching for some witty remark, of the sort that the scriptwriters used to put in the mouth of Jerry Orbach on the old Law & Order. They wanted to know who Omar was and where he came from and what was his relationship with the missing woman; and there was Omar’s pistol to explain, and my idea of the threat against Ms. Kellogg and what had happened out on the street with the maybe Russian thugs. Ms. Kellogg was staying here with you? Why wasn’t she at a hotel? Was she your girlfriend, Mr. Mishkin?

No, she was not; no, I did not know why anyone would have taken her; they only wanted the manuscript. Why did they want the manuscript, Mr. Mishkin? Was it very valuable? Not as such, but some people thought it could lead to something very valuable. Oh, like a treasure map? Here the eye rolling started, the smirking. And here I said something like, “You can smirk all you want to, but a man was tortured to death to reveal the whereabouts of that thing, and now a woman has been kidnapped, and you’re still treating the whole thing as a joke.” And then we had a discussion about Professor Bulstrode.

In fairness, this was the sort of thing that urban police detectives rarely encounter. They wanted it to be a domestic with elements of rich-guy looniness. The police covered surfaces with black fingerprint powder, took many photos, took Omar’s gun and samples of the blood he had shed in my service, and left, saying they would be in touch. As soon as they were gone I went out myself, to the garage on Hudson where Rashid had parked the Lincoln, and drove to St. Vincent’s Hospital to check on Omar. I was unsurprised to see the two detectives there, and I couldn’t get in to see him until they had finished extracting the nothing he knew. The hospital wanted to keep him overnight for observation because of the concussion, and so I left him with the assurance that I would contact his family and that he must not worry about the expenses.

I made that unpleasant call from my cell phone and I was just putting it away when it buzzed again and it was Miranda.

“Where are you? Are you all right?” was naturally (and stupidly) the first thing out of my mouth, although I knew she could not answer the first question and that the answer to the second was dreadfully patent.

“I’m fine.” In a voice that was not fine at all.

“Where are you?” Stupid!

“I don’t know. They put a bag over my head. Look, Jake, you can’t call the police. They said I should call you and tell you that.”

“All right, I won’t,” I lied.

“Is Omar all right? They hit him…”

“Omar is fine. What do they want? They have the goddamned letter-why did they have to take you?”

“They want the other letters, the ones written in cipher.”

“I don’t understand-I gave you everything that your uncle gave me. I don’t know anything about any cipher.”

“No, they were there in the original find. There’s a woman here, Carolyn-I think they’re holding her too…”

“A Russian?”

“No, an American. She says that there were coded letters in the package but someone didn’t deliver them like they were supposed to.”

“Who didn’t?”

“It’s not important. These people say they own the documents, they say they paid my uncle cash for them, a lot of cash, and that he tried to cheat them. Jake, they’re going to…”

Actually it’s too painful to try and reconstruct this dialogue. We were both yelling into the phone (although I am ordinarily careful never to raise my voice into a cell phone as so many of my fellow citizens do, so that the streets often appear to be taken over by the mad; and I often wonder what the truly mad think of this) and someone cut her off in midsentence. The burden of the conversation was clear; unless I came up with some ciphered letters mentioned by Bracegirdle they would handle her as they had her uncle, and also that, if they thought that the police were involved, they would dispose of her instantly.

Gunshots in the fog, three flat, concussive noises from the lake, and there is definitely the sound of a motor craft, an insectile buzz that sounds as if it comes from a long way off. Hunters? Is this duck season? I have no idea. In case not, I have just reloaded and cocked my pistol, a comforting activity I find. I should have said before this that Mickey’s cabin is at the extreme southern end of Lake Henry. There is a detailed hydrographic chart of the lake framed on the living room wall, and on it you can see that it was originally two lakes. Around 1900, the summering plutocrats who owned the land dammed an outlet and the water rose and left a string of islands extending out from the eastern shore, an excellent place to play pirates, Mickey has informed me, but you can’t drive a boat of any size between them because of hidden rocks. You get to this house either via New Weimar and a long slow drive down a third-rate road and a further drive on a gravel one (which is what I did) or you can get off the thruway at Underwood and take a short drive on a good road to the town of Lake Henry at the lake’s extreme northern tip and get into your mahogany speedboat and, after a twelve-mile jaunt, arrive in more style, which is the route Mickey and his family almost always traveled. The land route is actually shorter by a little over an hour, but a lot less comfortable. If I were a stylish sort of thug, I would rent or buy a motor craft, come south from the town, whack my guy, and then on the way back dump the corpse, suitably weighted, into the lake, which is nearly sixty feet deep at its greatest depth, not quite farther than did ever plummet sound, but deep enough.

Examining my diary for the following day I find that the morning meetings are scratched out and I remember that I called in after a nearly sleepless night and spoke with Ms. Maldonado. I asked her to cancel these appointments and reschedule them and asked her one important question, to which the answer was yes. Ms. Maldonado makes two copies of absolutely everything, she is the Princess of Xerox, and it turned out that she had indeed made copies of the Bracegirdle manuscript. Then Omar called me begging to be rescued from the hospital, so I went and got him. He took the wheel gladly, looking in his white medical turban more like his desert ancestors than he usually did. As he proudly informed me, he had another gun; I did not wish to inquire further.

At my direction, we picked up the Bracegirdle copies at my office and proceeded north on the East River Drive to Harlem. Although I questioned him again about the previous night’s events, he could add nothing, except an apology for having been cold-cocked and losing his charge. He could not imagine how someone had got into the loft and into position to surprise him in that way, and neither could I-another mystery added to those already accumulated in this affair.

Our destination that morning was a group of tenement buildings on 151st Street off Frederick Douglass Boulevard that my brother, Paul, owns, or rather operates, since he doesn’t officially own anything. He picked them up as burned husks at a tax sale some years ago when buildings of this type were burning almost daily and has renovated them into what he refers to as an urban monastery. Paul is a Jesuit priest, a perhaps surprising revelation, since the last time I mentioned him he was a jailed thug. He is still something of a thug, which is why I went to visit him after Miranda disappeared. He has a profound understanding of violent evil.

I suppose that one of the great shocks of my life was the discovery that Paul was smart, probably smarter than me in many ways. Many families assign roles to their members, and in our family Miriam was the dumb beauty, I was the smart one, and Paul was the tough one, the black sheep. He never did a day’s work in school, dropped out at seventeen, and as I mentioned, did a twenty-six-month jolt in Auburn for armed robbery. You can imagine the fate of a handsome, blond, white boy in Auburn. The usual choice is to be raped by everyone or raped exclusively by one of the big yard bulls. Paul chose the latter course as being healthier and safer and submitted to this fellow’s attentions until he had fashioned a shank, whereupon he fell upon the yard bull one night while he slept and stabbed him a remarkable number of times (although fortunately not quite to death). Paul spent the rest of his prison time in solitary, along with the child molesters and Mafia informants. He became a reader there, which I know about because every month I used to make up a package of books for him in response to his requests. In two years I observed in amazement his progression from pulp fiction, to good fiction, to philosophy and history, and finally theology. By the time he made parole he was reading Küng and Rahner.

Upon his release, he immediately joined the army, having no other prospects and desiring an education. This was at the height of the Vietnam War and they were not being too particular. I suppose the grand-paternal Stieff genes must have kicked in because he proved to be an exemplary soldier: airborne, Ranger, Special Forces, Silver Star. He spent his two tours largely back in the Shans, as we used to say, in the contested region where Laos, Vietnam, and Cambodia come together, running with a band of montagnards just like Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now. This is virtually Paul’s only comment on that experience: it was just like the movie.

Strangely enough, the horror, the horror, did not make him into a monster but into something like a saint. He went to St. John’s on the G.I. Bill and then signed up for the Jesuits. When he told me this I thought he was joking, I mean the notion of Paul as a priest, much less a Jesuit, but it goes to show that you can never tell about one’s near and dear. I was, as I say, totally flabbergasted.

In any event, he returned to New York with the idea of building a kind of settlement house in a blighted neighborhood, and so he did, but being Paul and considering the social experiment tradition of the Society of Jesus, the thing had a certain twist; he was easily distinguishable from Jane Addams. I say he was a saint, but he also remained a thug. There are a number of these types in the calendar of the saints, including, for one, the founder of Paul’s own order. Paul’s theory is that our civilization is collapsing into a dark age and that the advancing edges of this are visible in urban ghettos. He says dark ages are all about forgetting civilization and its arts and also the increasing reluctance of the ruling classes to pay for civic life. This sealed the fate of Rome, he claims. He doesn’t think that the ghetto needs uplift, however, but rather that when the crash comes, the poor will survive better than their masters. They need less, he says, and they are more charitable, and they don’t have to unlearn as much. This was why Jesus preferred them. Yes, quite crazy; but when I observe the perfect helplessness of my fellow citizens of the middle class and higher, our utter dependence on electricity, cheap gas, and the physical service of unseen millions, our reluctance to pay our fair share, our absurd gated enclaves, our “good buildings,” and our incompetence at any task other than the manipulation of symbols, I often think he has a point.

So Paul has constructed, under the guise of a mission church and a school, a kind of early medieval abbey. It consists of three buildings, or rather two buildings and the empty space between them once occupied by a tenement totally gutted by the fire and later demolished. This space is fronted on the street by a wall and a gate and through this gate walked Omar and I that day. It is always open. (We left the limo on the street. Such is the authority of the place that I was sure no one would molest it.) The footprint of the former building is now a sort of cloister, with a vegetable garden, a little terrace with a fountain, and a playground. One of the buildings is a K-12 school, partially residential, and the other consists of offices, dormitories, and workshops. There is a L’Arche community on site, which is a group that lives with and cares for severely disabled people, and there is also a part-time medical clinic and a Catholic Worker soup kitchen. The place was its usual chaos: the halt, mad, and crippled doing their thing, clumps of robed rehabilitated gangsters working at various tasks, and neatly uniformed schoolchildren racing about, quite the medieval scene. Omar always feels entirely at home here.

I came to Paul on this occasion because his intelligence has a devious edge to it, rather like that of our dad. I am an infant in comparison, and although it often galls me to depend on my brother in this way, I occasionally do. He says it is good for my soul.

We found him in the basement of the school building discussing a boiler with some contractors. He was wearing a blue coverall and was quite filthy, although Paul makes even dirt look good. He is somewhat shorter than I am but far more elegantly built. To my eye he has not changed much from what he looked like when I picked him up at the airport on his return from the army nearly twenty-five years ago, except his hair is longer on top. He still resembles Rutger Hauer in Blade Runner or an SS recruiting poster. He gave us a big smile, white teeth gleaming in the dim basement, and embraced both of us. Leaving the contractors to their work with a few more words, he ran us up to his office, a tiny cramped room with a view of the terrace/cloister and the playground, and of course he wanted to know about Omar’s head. I think he likes Omar somewhat more than he likes me. No, that’s a lie, but let it sit there on the page. Paul loves me, and it drives me nuts. I am not at all nice to him. I can’t help it. I think it is Izzy’s introjection boiling up from inside me, full of contemptuous disdain.

After Paul got the whole story out of Omar, and after he’d heard a good deal of tedious data about Omar’s family and the suffering of his relations on the West Bank, Omar excused himself for his noon prayers. Just after he left, an exquisite brown boy trotted in with a message, looking remarkably fine in his school uniform, which is a navy blazer, gray slacks, white shirt, and a white-and-black striped tie. When he had gone I said, rolling my eyes, “Getting any of that now? Peachy buttocks glowing in the dim sacristy lamplight…”

“Elderly nuns satisfy my residual lusts, thank you,” he said, still smiling. “And speaking of sexual excess, you seem to have got yourself in a jam again over a woman. Who is this Miranda?”

“No one special, just a client. I only had her stay at my place because some people seemed to be following her.”

“Uh-huh. You know, Amalie called me this morning. She seemed pretty upset.”

“Well, gosh, Paul, I’m sorry Amalie’s upset. I know! Why don’t you marry her. Then you can be all perfect together and I can sink further into depravity. Me and Miri-”

“Miri’s worried about you too. What’s all this about Russian gangsters?”

Another thing that drives me crazy is my family talking about me behind my back. One reason I try to live a blameless life (the sex part aside) is to reduce the zone of gossip, but clearly I have failed in this. I suppressed whatever I might have felt at the time because the entire purpose of my visit was to seek Paul’s counsel in this affair. No one I know has a wider network of contacts at all levels of society in New York, from street bums to the mayor. So I gave him the whole tale-Bulstrode, the Bracegirdle manuscript, the murder, the mugging, the conversation with Miri (although he knew about that already from her), meeting Miranda, her abduction, and the phone call.

He listened more or less in silence and when I’d finished, he made a rotating motion with his hand and said, “And…?”

“And what?”

“Did you? With Miss Kellogg? No, don’t bother to lie, I can see it on your face.”

“And this is the most important thing to you? That I fucked this woman? The murder, the kidnapping, that’s all irrelevant compared with where I stick my schlong?”

“No, but where you stick your schlong seems to determine the course of your life, and messes up the lives of a number of people I love. Hence my interest.”

“Oh, I thought that fucking was the only thing the church was interested in. Or were you not speaking ex cathedra?”

“Yeah, you persist in thinking lust is your problem. Lust is not your problem, speaking ex cathedra, and in a dozen or so years it’ll have taken care of itself. It’s a miserable little sin after all. No, your problem is acedia and it always has been. The refusal to do necessary spiritual work. You always took on the responsibility for every bad thing that happened to our family, probably including World War II, all by yourself…”

“You were in jail.”

“Yes, but irrelevant. God wasn’t in jail but you didn’t ask for any help in that direction. No, you took it all on and failed, and you never forgave yourself, and so you think you’re beyond all forgiveness, and that gives you the license to hurt all the people who love you because after all, poor Jake Mishkin is so far outside the pale, so bereft of all hope of heaven, that anyone who loves him must be delusional and thus not worth considering. And why are you grinning at me, you turd? Because you’ve made me say the same thing I always say when you come up here and now you can forget it again, even though you know it’s true. Sloth. The sin against hope. And you know it’s going to kill you someday.”

“Just like Mutti? Do you really think so?” A high-pitched grinding sound came from the machine shop below, where they repaired bicycles. He waited until it stopped and said, “Yes, I do. As you know. Like the man said, God who made us without our help will not save us without our consent. Either you’ll cry mercy and forgive and be forgiven, or die the death.”

“Yes, Father,” I said, looking piously upward.

He sighed, tired of the pathetic old game I make him play. I was tired of it too but could not keep my clawed fingers away from the unendurable, unsalvable itch. He said, “Yes, you’ve manipulated me into preaching and you have therefore won yet again. Congratulations. Meanwhile, what are we going to do about this problem of yours?”

“I don’t know. That’s why I came to see you.”

“You think this Russian, Shvanov, is involved?”

“As muscle, yes. But I can’t figure out who’s behind it.”

“Why bother? The manuscript is gone, and this woman disappearing seems like a matter for the cops.”

“I was told not to involve the cops. She said they’d kill her.”

“And you feel it’s your responsibility to rescue her.”

“I said I’d protect her and I didn’t; so, yes I do.”

“You want to continue the affair. You’re in love.”

“What the hell does that matter? She’s a human being in mortal danger.”

He steepled his hands against his chin and gave me an uncomfortably penetrating stare, which is what he does now instead of kicking my ass. Then he said, “Well, of course I’ll help in any way I can. I have a couple of contacts down at Police Plaza. I’ll make some calls, get some background on this guy Shvanov, and also get the word out that this is serious-”

“No, don’t do that! Don’t involve the cops at all. You have other kinds of contacts.”

“I do. All right, I’ll see what the street has to say.”

“Thank you. The main thing I’m worried about is Amalie and the kids. If they want to put more pressure on me…”

“I’ll take care of that too,” he replied, after a brief considerate pause. This, of course, is what I had come for. Paul knows a lot of tough kids, what they call original gangsters, in that neighborhood, and he has an odd relationship with them. He thinks they’re exactly like the Germanic or Slavic barbarians that the missionaries who were sent out in the dark centuries met and converted-proud, violent, hungry for they know not what. In the early days of the mission Paul had to literally fight people on the street to demonstrate that he was tougher than they were, which he was. That he had a rep, that he was known to have stabbed people in prison, didn’t hurt. That he had personally killed more people than all of them put together, and looked it, was another plus.

Also, Paul claimed that compared with the montagnards, New York gangbangers weren’t very tough. None of them had ever missed a meal and if imprisoned had been housed in what would have seemed luxurious spas to the average Hmong. He said his guys over there could have eaten all the Crips, Bloods, and Gangster Disciples for breakfast. And their pathetic bravado inspired compassion in him rather than the terror common among the better classes. (Paul is not afraid of anything mortal, nor was he at ten.) But he took them seriously as tribes, and like the Jesuits of old he targeted their leaders, the most violent of the violent, and over time had come to a concordat of sorts with them, which was that there was to be no dope sold and no whores run within a certain pale around Paul’s buildings, and that people fleeing the vengeance of the street could find sanctuary within. Some few of the street lords have actually been converted. A larger number sent their children or their younger brothers and sisters to be educated at his school. It was a very Dark Ages arrangement and perfectly natural to a man like my brother.

Now I could see that Paul, having made his decision to help, couldn’t wait to get me out of there. Not a comfortable man, my brother, sort of like Jesus in Matthew, always at the run, impatient with the apostles, conscious of the shortness of the time, the need to get the successors up and ready for when the founder must leave the scene. He just turned away and started talking to some boys, and so I collected Omar and made my grateful exit.

In the car we headed west and south until the Columbia campus hove into view. I generally have a pretty good idea of Mickey Haas’s schedule and so I knew that Thursdays he held office hours all morning. I called him and he was in and yes he’d be glad to have lunch with me, at the faculty club for a change. I have always found the dining room on the fourth floor of Faculty House at Columbia one of the more pleasant places to lunch in New York: a beautifully proportioned airy chamber, with one of the best views of the city from its high windows, and a perfectly adequate prix fixe buffet, but Mickey prefers our usual Sorrentino’s. I think it’s because he likes to get somewhat drunk at our lunches and prefers to do this out of sight of his peers. Perhaps he also enjoys having my limo sent for him.

Just before we reached the club, my cell rang and it was my sister.

“You were right,” she said. “Osip would really like to meet you.”

“That was fast,” I said. “He must owe you a favor.”

“Osip doesn’t owe favors, Jake, he collects them. As a matter of fact, he called me and asked me to set it up. That’s not a good sign.”

“I’m sure it’ll be fine,” said I, not at all sure. “Where and when?”

“Do you know Rasputin’s? On Lafayette?”

“You have to be kidding. That’s like meeting John Gotti in a Godfather’s Pizza place.”

“What can I say? Osip has a sense of humor. Anyway, he says he’ll be there after ten tomorrow tonight. I would say ‘be careful,’ if it weren’t too banal for words. But you will be careful, won’t you? If not, I assume you’ll want to rest beside Mutti in Green-Wood. I’ll send the most vulgar wreath imaginable.”

I recall that Mickey and I had the roast beef and shared a bottle of Melville cabernet, so appropriate, he joked, for a professor of English. Mickey was actually in a pretty good mood, and I asked him if his financial position had improved at all and he said it had: here followed a blizzard of information about hedge funds and REITs and commodities trading that went in one ear and out the other. Sensing my disinterest, he politely changed the subject and asked me what was new with me. In answer, I drew out the copy of Bracegirdle’s letter I had picked up from Ms. M. that morning and slid it across the table. “Only this,” I said.

“This is it? The Bulstrode thing? Good God!” Naturally he could read the Jacobean scrawl as easily as you read Times New Roman, and he began to do so at once, rapt, and ignored the waiter when he came to ask about dessert, a unique occurrence in my experience. Twenty or so minutes passed as he turned the pages, occasionally making a quiet exclamation-“Holy shit!”-and similar while I drank coffee and gazed at the diners and played eye games with an attractive brunette at another table. My inner theater was showing what it usually did after a meeting with my brother: a thoroughgoing denigration of him and his works, who did he think he was playing the great blue-eyed white god descending upon the ghetto unasked to bring salvation to the darkies! It was absurd, nearly obscene, nearly Nazi in its colossal arrogance. The sad pleasure of this shadow play ceased only when Mickey beside me said “Wow!” loud enough to draw the attention of the brunette and several others.

He pounded the papers with a stubby digit. “Do you realize what this is?”

“Sort of. Miranda read it and explained its value, although I’m sure I don’t have a scholar’s sense of it.”

“Miranda Kellogg? She’s seen this?” He seemed a little upset.

“Well, yes. She’s the legal owner of the original.”

“But you have custody of it at present?”

So I related the events of the past twenty-four hours. He was stunned. “That’s terrible,” he said. “Absolutely catastrophic!”

“Yes, I’m extremely concerned about her.”

“No, I meant the manuscript, the original,” he said, with a callousness worthy of a lawyer. “Without that, this is valueless,” he added, tapping the pile of copy paper again. “My God, we have to get it back! Do you have any idea what’s at stake?”

“People are always asking me that, and my answer is ‘not really.’ Ammunition in some literary squabble?” My tone was cold but he ignored it, for this was a new Mickey, no more the laid-back gentleman-scholar, amusingly contemptuous of how his confreres struggled to climb the greasy poles of academe. He had the fire in his eye. The new Mickey expatiated upon the colossal academic value of Mr. B.’s screed; I listened, as to someone describing the details of a complex and tedious surgical procedure.

At length I put in, “So it’s a big deal if Shakespeare was a Catholic?”

“It’s a big deal if Shakespeare was anything. I already went through this with you. We know almost nothing about the interior life of the greatest writer in the history of the human race. Look…just one example of thousands, and bears on the matter at hand. A woman has recently written a book, she’s an amateur scholar, but she’s certainly done her research, and in this book she claims that nearly the whole corpus of Shakespeare’s work, in particular the plays, is an elaborate coded apology for Catholicism and a plea to the monarch of the day for relief of the disabilities that Catholics then suffered. I mean she gives literally hundreds of heterodox readings arguing this theory in reference to all the plays, and she also proposes the protective hand of powerful contemporary Catholic peers to explain why Shakespeare wasn’t called to account for writing this easily readable code for the public stage. I mean it’s a complete and original picture explaining nearly all of Shakespeare’s work. How about that?”

I shrugged and asked, “So-is she right?”

“I don’t know! Nobody knows!” This a semishout, provoking more looks from the peers. I could now see why Mickey might hesitate to dine here. “That’s the fucking point, Jake! She could be right. Or someone could write a book demonstrating through just as thorough an analysis of the same plays that Shakespeare was gay, a good Protestant faggot. Or a monarchist. Or a lefty. Or a woman. Or the Earl of Oxford. That’s the basic, intractable problem with all Shakespeare studies that bear on intent or biography, and now this!” Tap tap tap. “If genuine…I say if genuine, it will be the greatest single event in Shakespeare studies since…I don’t know, since forever. Since the field was born as a rational entity in the eighteenth century.”

“This letter does that?”

“Not as such. It’s just the first taste, the first tiny opening taste of paradise. But Jake”-he lowered his voice and moved his mouth closer to my ear in a near parody of a man seeking confidentiality-“Jake, if this guy spied on William Shakespeare, if he wrote down reports, if he described Shakespeare’s life the way he described his own miserable life…oh, Jesus, that would be something real. Not just speculation based on the use of images in the second act of King fucking Lear, but actual data. Who he saw, what he said, his ordinary speech, what he believed, what he ate and drank, was he a big tipper, how long was his dick…Jake, you have no fucking idea.”

“Well, I have some idea what that manuscript play would be worth.” He rolled his eyes and made a show of fanning his face. “Oh, that. We are not going to even think about that. No, I will be creaming in my panties if we can even get hold of those ciphered letters he mentions. No wonder old Bulstrode was playing it so close, the poor bastard. Not to speak ill of the dead, but you might’ve thought that after all I did for him he would’ve given me a little peek when this fell into his hands.”

“It must’ve driven him crazy. He didn’t say anything to his niece either.”

“Yes. Poor woman. You don’t have any idea where these spy letters could be?”

“I don’t, but what I want to know now, and maybe you can help me here, is why a Russian gangster is interested in them enough to commit a federal crime. He’s probably not in the Modern Language Association.”

“An organization brimful of gangsters and worse,” said Mickey, smiling. “But I take your point.” He paused, and a peculiar dreamy expression came over his face for just an instant, as if he had just inhaled a mouthful of opium, eyes partly closed, as if contemplating a paradise just out of reach. He came back, however, with an almost audible snap and said,

“Unless…”

I knew just what he meant. “Yeah, unless Bulstrode discovered something on his trip to England that established the existence of the…Item. The Item, let’s say, really exists, and these guys, or someone hiring these guys, knows about it and wants it. But it turns out that the ciphered letters are part of the trail that leads to it. Do we even know if they were with this letter?”

“You’re asking me?”

“Well, yeah. You know more about all this stuff than anyone else but Bulstrode himself and possibly Miranda, both of whom are currently out of reach. Obviously, someone offered Bulstrode a manuscript. What if there were others in the bundle, and he declined to buy them?”

“Impossible! He would’ve sold both his grandmothers for a package like that.”

“Yes, but absent a bull market in grandmothers, how much would he have had to offer, say for just the Bracegirdle original?”

“I don’t know…fifty grand, maybe, if the seller wanted instant cash. At auction, God knows what it would have fetched. Maybe twice that, three times…”

“And did Bulstrode have that kind of cash?”

“Hell, no. He was skinned by the lawyers over that phony Hamlet business. I had to advance him money on his salary when he came over here. Wait a minute…!”

“Yeah, right. If he didn’t have serious money, how did he get hold of the manuscript? Two possibilities. Either he paid a far lower price to an owner who didn’t know what it was, in which case, when the seller was conned into thinking that the Bracegirdle wasn’t worth that much, and if he had the ciphers, he didn’t offer them to Bulstrode at all. Or, Bulstrode sees the whole package and the seller knows the real value and he wants major bucks for it. So why doesn’t Bulstrode go to the Folger? Or to his good pal Dr. Haas for that matter?”

A bitter laugh here. “Because he knew I was broke too?”

“Did he? But let’s say it was because the provenance is shaky. The seller is something of a crook himself, but he knows the value of these letters as a key to something even more gigantic. So Bulstrode goes to Mr. Big and sells him on a deal-help me buy the package and we’ll find the most valuable item on earth and-”

“That’s ridiculous! I mean, sure, Andrew could have lowballed a naive seller, but he couldn’t possibly have known any Mr. Bigs. He hardly knew anyone in New York.”

I thought about this and agreed that Mickey was probably right. Miranda had said much the same thing. I thought for a while and said, “Then there has to be a tertium quid.”

“You mean someone who knew the value of what Bulstrode had and also knew gangsters? And wanted the big payoff. Are there people like that?”

“Yes,” I said. “I’m a person like that. I know a distinguished professor of English literature, you, and I also know some hard boys. It’s probably not as uncommon as we’d like to believe. Stockbroker types never seem to have trouble finding a thug to knock off their wives. Or vice versa. In any case, Bulstrode may have gone to this person and confided that he had the Item within reach. This person, for whatever reason, lets the hard boys know about it. Bulstrode goes to England and comes back. He knows he’s being followed, so he stashes the package with me. Then the gangsters grab him and torture him enough to get my name out of him, which is why I’m in their sights and why Miranda was taken, and why they want to get their hands on the ciphers.”

“Which neither she nor you have, since Bulstrode didn’t. Do we know they even exist?”

“Mr. Tertium obviously does. Tell me, did Bulstrode ever mention to you the name of the person who sold him the manuscript?”

“Never. Christ! Why didn’t he come to me? It would’ve been the easiest thing in the world to arrange a purchase at any reasonable price.”

Here I told him what Miranda had related to me about Bulstrode’s shame over the fake Hamlet affair and the extent of his paranoia. Mickey shook his head. “That poor ass! God, he’d be alive now if he had. But, you know, it shouldn’t be all that hard to learn the name of the seller. Andrew had an appointment diary. Or he could’ve given the seller a check. The trouble is that his diary and checkbook are still being held by the cops.”

“Yes. But there may be ways around that. It occurs to me that I’m the lawyer for the Bulstrode estate and the lawyer for its heiress. I’ll see whether the cops will let me examine that material.”

And so on and so on. I’m fairly sure that’s where the idea of checking on who sold the papers came up. After I left Mickey, I received a call on my cell phone from Detective Murray returning mine of the previous night. He had, of course, heard about the break-in, theft, and abduction and wanted to talk to me. I concocted a story for him. There had been no abduction, I said. Ms. Kellogg had called me and said she was fine, that she had left the apartment before the assault, that she had the papers in her possession. They were her property, technically, and there was really no reason for us to get alarmed because a grown woman had decided to take a hike. He said that was a good attitude because there was clearly no connection at all between the brouhaha around my old papers and the death of Andrew Bulstrode, the investigation of which was closed as of today. He’d been killed by a nineteen-year-old homosexual prostitute named Chico Garza, who was in police custody and had made a full confession, and it was just as they’d thought, a sexual game gone sour. The boy had been caught trying to use Bulstrode’s Visa card. So he had been right, I agreed, using a relieved tone. A street mugging, an attempted burglary and assault, a missing woman: all coincidences. I apologized for doubting him, and he graciously replied that citizens, taught by the plots of thrillers, usually tried to complexify things, while real crimes were typically stupid and simple, as here. Happens all the time.

I agreed that it probably did and presumed that, since the investigation was completed, there would be no objection to me, as the lawyer in the case, looking into some of his papers on estate business? No objection at all, he said.

THE SECOND CIPHERED LETTER

My Lord, be assured I am well rebuked by your cypher of 16^th Jan^y & will endeavour to pleaze you better hereafter by writing briefer: for as I am but recently come to this intelligenceing I know not what to put and what is dross & unworthy of yr. worshipes regard. Oure strategem proceedeth thus: upon the Princesse Elizabeth her name-daye as you foretold, there was projected celebratioun & feastinge at White-Hall & we are commanded to playe Much Ado abt. Nothinge & some masques of Mr. Johnson. Since the tyme that last I wrote I have become of the company, not a clerke of the bookes onlie but also as indeed all the otheres are too a factotum: I lift & carry, paint & build & beyond these mechanickal labours I also serve to swell a scene, as soldier, attendant-lord, &c. with trumperie robes, basinnets, tinne swords, &c. at perill of my sowle I think, but God will comprehend it and forgive, for I doe not give speche upon the stage. In these weekes I am much with W.S., for he favours me & keepes me at his howse by Black-Friers. On the daye afore-mentioned I am to be of the Watch & also Lord Attendant to Don Pedro; but verie neare the houre of performance oure Mr. Ussher falls from the stage by mischance & can not stand & soe I must play the Boy as well, that is a speakeing parte, but two lines, & I sware I would rather face the tercio of Seville in full battel than speke before an audience & this a royal one too; but I did wel enow though I quaked.

The King falleth asleep in Act III which they tell me he doeth always but the Quene & Princesse clap full lustilie & after-ward wee are fed cakes & malmsey wine in a side chamber. Now comes in a noble lord Sir Robert Veney, dressed verie fine & he is of my lord the Earl of Rochester’s partie. He hath speche with W.S. & Mr Burbadge & then W.S. beckons me with a confuzed looke upon his face & I go as bid & this Veney carryes me a little way across the chamber & askes me if I know what is afoot. Yea, sir, saies I: for you have told me of it in youre cypher, my Lord, & he giveth me privilie (but onlie seeminge privilie) a sealed letter & he saith boy I would see feare upon thy face now, as one seeing a ghost. And he departs & I thrust the letter into my bosom & it takes no schill at playinge for me to tremmble & shew a timorous face.

Then they all wished to learn what the Lord Veney hath sayde to me, but I would not, sayinge tis a private matter & they all of them mock me, what private matter doth a lord have with lykes of thee save venerie & they make much witt on this, grasping theyre cods & cavorting & callinge me Lord Veneries punk. But I see W.S. doth not join, or but a littel, & regards me some thinge solemn.

Next daye in Black-Friers he cometh in to the closet where I sit alone at my countynge bookes & sitts him down: quoth he Dick you are a brave-looking fellowe but not I thinke so prettie as to make rampant the lustes of Sir Robert Veney & besides you are made to tupp maydes. Come, then, have I not ben your goode cosen? Tell me what hath passed between you & this gentleman; or if you cannot upon your honour tell it in fulle then do you drawe the matter lightly, so I maye know its shape & that it concernes not me & this company. Why think you, sir, saies I, that it might concern you & he then toucheth the sign royal upon his liverie coate & saies lad you are no lack-wit. We are the Kinges Men & this Veney is in the bosom of my Lord Rochester & my Lord rules the King as all men know. Now if My Lord need anie conversation with oure company he will send to me, or Mr Burbadge, or Mr Hemmynge, or anie sharer: so must I aske why he calleth oute a boye; a boye lately come to us, with a storie he is my cosen; a boye who when he sits to meate maketh privilie the sign of the cross upon his harte. Soe my cosen, cozzen me not. And he lookes at me verie close & severe as I have not before seen hym looke at anie man: and I bethinke me he sees alle, I am undone; but I draw up my courage thinkeing too: ah he snaps at the bayte.

Whereupon I fall upon my knees crieing oh my cosen spare your wrath though I am a traitoure; I am set to spye on thee for My Lord Rochester. He groweth pale: how cometh this, saies he, I have done nothinge against that noble lord & it seemeth he still doth smyle upon me. Quoth I: oh sir it has all to doe with weightie matteres of faith & politicks & the devizes of the great & I am just a poore boye a ship-wracked mariner & how come I to meddel with these thinges: & I commence to weepe: & these reale teares, I trowe. He asketh, art my cosen in dede or wase that false invention? I say no twas all trewth & sware on my motheres grave that the Earle hath chose mee for that reasoun soe thou might truste mee the mor.

Then he raiseth me up to chayre, saying, now doe you be a true man, my lad & tell me all. Soe saie I to hym all we have agreed between us my lord what was all writ in your last cypher, viz: the King desireth a Catholic match for Prince Henry in the cause of peace, the which the Puritans in Parliament right hartilie contemn; my lord the Earle favours this and hath the charge of it, for which the Puritans hate him all; these knaves crie out the late Quene did not treate us so (though I thinke she did, but theyre memorie fadeth with tyme), & mutter this King is but a brat of a papist whore; the King groweth wearie with the comparisoun & with the despisinge of the Quene his mother & wishes to shew himself a greater monarch than Elizabeth. Now my lord Earle hath conceived a plan. What if a playe should be made upon Queen Mary of Scotland, such as would shew her in a better light & shew olde Bess as a tyrannous harridan enslaved to canting Puritans, which when it be broadlie heard shall temper the feelinges of the people toward the Quene of Scotland. For such thinges hath been done before: wase not Harry Bolingbroke the usurper made noble and Crookback Dick shown vile cruel caitiff? And would such a playe not discomforte the Puritan factioun & turn the people gainst them? And who in Englande writes best such playes?

At this he catches my meaning & cries what, he desires me to write this playe? I saie yes cosen, His lordship the Earle thus commands thee. But W.S. cries him such a playe was ne’er heard of before. You know the King hath dismissd the Black-Friars boyes & ruined theyre company for a slight gainst Scotland in theyre Edward Second, what should he doe to a playe that slighteth greate Elizabeth & the Protestant church entire? Zblood! I believe thee not, boye; this mustbe some practice upon me by mine enemies.

At this wase I some-wyse discomfited, my Lord, for I see he is close to uncovering our strategems, but I saie, nay, sir, it is by the Earles own command, for lookest thou: this is why my lord Veney approached me and not you or another sharer. Wee are all overlooked by spyes & this can not be seen to come of the Earle. It must be wrote out in secret, onlie I knowinge & thee & shewn to the Earle & he will soften the King to let it playe. For his majestie is timorous; he would crush the Puritans but dare not, or not now. For this projected playe is but parte of a grander complot that needeth more tyme to hatch: the Spanish marriage, new-made bischops, new lawes gainst Puritain conventicles & relief for papists. As I sayde this I study him close but could find nothinge revealled in his face. Quoth he, why should the King favour papists now, who near slew him in the Yeare Five? And I answer, why should he give his sonne to them that paid Guy Fawkes his fee? It is policie cosen, and the lykes of us can not compass it, but muste do as we are bid by the greate. But one thynge is sure: the King must have his bischops to rule the church & here is he closer to the papists than to the Puritans. And he saies still I can not credit it & heere I take out from my bosom the letter forged with my lord of Rochesters seale: credit then this, saith I & give it over. Soe he doth reade it; & after saith, my lord desires it by Christmas. Quaere: Canst thou do it by then? Aye, saies he, I have a smale thinge to be done with, a playe of the New Worlde & ship-wracke & magickal islandes & thy boat-swaine in it too, another fort-nighte sees it done. Then maye I starte upon this & maye God keepe us alle, upon sayinge so he doth crosse himselfe as doe I, the while thinkynge now sir we have thee.

Then his face that was cast in lines of care doth clear of a sudden & he smileth sayinge you promised to shew me how to worke arithmetick in the new stile & he grasps at the proper word & I say algorism thou meanest & he writes it in hys booke & asks in what tongue is that word & I saye my maistre sayed it wase Arabian & he saith it some few tymes. Soe we commence to studie arithmetick & methinkes my lord that we must go earlie to the field & have oure witts about us if we are to catch this onne. For never saw I man soe close-barred & deep-moated gainst the examination of other men. Mr Burbadge playeth his parte upon the stage to be suire, yet when dismounted is plain Dick: but this Shaxespure playeth ever & all ways & I thinke no man can see the man who lieth beneathe the player. With alle honour & my humble duty to yr. Lordship & may God confound thy enemies & the foes of alle trew religion from London this Friday the 26^th Januarye 1610 Richard Bracegirdle