The Book of Air and Shadows

13

I am reading a little Shakespeare now, in the intervals between sleeping, eating, and writing this thing. Mickey’s got a Riverside here, of course, not to mention any number of supplementary texts, lexicons, critical works, and so forth. Shall I add my own little bit of bird shit to Everest? I think not, although I have to say that Bracegirdle has given me a somewhat different take on the guy. As I’ve already said, I have had some commerce with creative types and I have indeed seen in them the same peculiar blankness that our Dick picked up in W.S. Like they’re talking to you and doing business and all but you get the feeling you’re talking not to a regular person but to a fictional character they made up? I just mean writers here; musicians are quite different, like large hairy children.

It so happened, my little diary tells me, that I spent the next morning with a musician whose name you would undoubtedly know if you were rockin’ in the ’80s at all and this fellow had written at least fifteen Top Twenty songs, music and lyrics and (not having taken the precaution of consulting a good IP lawyer) had signed the copyright to these songs over to his label, in return for which the scumbag who owned the label gave him an advance of something like twenty-five grand. And gosh, the scumbag kept feeding him driblets of money, and of course the musician became famous and went on tours and made even more money, and flash forward twenty or so years, with his original group long dispersed and the crowds of fans with them, but the songs are now classics getting tons of airplay on every oldie station in the country and the label scumbag sells his copyrighted list to a media megacorp for close to a billion dollars and what is my guy’s share? Zip is what, the same as what he earns for all those zillions of oldie station plays, because, as practically no one understands, when you hear a song on the radio or TV the artist who’s singing the song gets nothing: only the copyright holder collects the ASCAP royalty.

So I sat down with the megacorp people and they said that while they agreed my client had been screwed to the floorboards, they had just dropped a bundle on what was basically an industrial commodity and the fact that it had arisen from my client’s guts and heart was neither here nor there. The musician took it, I have to say, pretty well. He just grinned and expressed amazement that he’d thought up stuff out of his head that had transformed itself into this huge piece of property, upon which a vast commercial empire now rested, and that he’d have to content himself with all the pleasure he’d given to so many people. As I said, big hairy kids.

In contrast to Shakespeare, who always had a good eye for the bottom line. Sure he sold Hamlet for ten pounds, maybe forty large in today’s money, but he sold it to himself, since he was a stockholder in the theatrical company that owned it, and he probably made a good deal more after old Dick Bracegirdle became his bookkeeper.

I’m digressing again because this next part is really painful.

After I had the bad-news meeting with the hairy former kid I went across town with Ed Geller and Shelly Grossbart to a monster cluster-fuck involving squadrons of lawyers, something that happens a lot nowadays when one media company proposes to buy another and I was there because I know a lot about foreign copyright law and it’s all too tedious to get into. The point is, however, that I was not at my best, because I was thinking about my lost Miranda and also about the poor schmuck of a musician. No one at the long polished table at which we sat was hairy, nor had any of them ever created anything that any normal person would wish to see or hear. Someone raised the issue of ring tones, and how the EU was going to handle them, and Ed looked at me, because I had done the most extensive work on this and I fumphered and gave what turned out to be the wrong answer and Shelly had to cover for me with an artful equivocation.

In any event, I was out of the office when the fateful call came through and Ms. Maldonado had not left a regular pink printed message slip in my in-basket but rather a yellow Post-it note on my desk lamp, which is what she does when someone calls and we don’t wish to log it in. In most cases this means a mistress (although I am infrequently called by mistresses at the office) but not today. I went out to her desk, flapping the little yellow slip inquiringly, and she said that Miranda Kellogg had called from Toronto. I immediately called the number she gave me and got a voice mailbox at an education ministry office that said Miranda Kellogg was not at her desk and would I like to leave a message? They used the familiar system that generates a machine voice for the body of this polite request, while the name itself is recorded by, presumably, the mailbox’s proprietor. It was a pleasant enough Canadian voice, but one I did not recognize. My belly now commenced churning; I declined to leave a message.

After that, I called the cops and arranged with Detective Murray to have Bulstrode’s files picked up. I sent Omar to do it and waited, during which time I called the Toronto number three times and the third time lucky, the phone picked up and there was the unfamiliar voice, heavier and slower than the voice of the person I had already started to call “my” Miranda. I told her who I was and asked her if she were the niece of the late Andrew B. and she said she was and she had just heard about his demise, having only lately come back to Toronto. She’d been in the Himalayas and quite out of touch. The Himalayas? Yes, she’d won a prize; someone had called her up one night and said she’d won a trip trekking through Nepal. It was either Nepal, Tahiti, or Kenya, your choice, and she’d always wanted to see India and Nepal, so she chose that. At first she’d thought it a scam, but no: a package had come in the mail the next day, Airborne Express, containing all the tickets and arrangements, but she had to leave that week or no deal. I asked her when that was, and she told me six weeks ago more or less; that is, early October, just before Bulstrode had returned to the United States. In any case, she’d read about her uncle’s death upon her return and thought she should call, even though she imagined the body would be going back to Oxford and Oliver. She said she didn’t think that there was any money involved, since she knew her silly old uncle was broke, but would I give her a buzz when I’d read the will? She thought that most of what he had would go to Oliver, but there was a lavaliere that had belonged to her grandmother that she’d been promised. I said I would and hung up, the phone slipping into its cradle on a film of my sweat.

I immediately called our estate law section and left an urgent message for Jasmine Ping. I sweated some more and tried to get interested in IP law but could not, even though I had to get a response ready for that Godzilla-eating-Rodan media merger business from the morning, no, the words would not cling to the appropriate brain tissue, and then in comes Omar with large brown cartons under each arm and I thrash through them and find a copy of the real last will and testament of Andrew Bulstrode rather than the phony one that my Miranda had presented. This, as the real Miranda had indicated, left all worldly goods to Oliver March, the longtime companion, aside from some small bequests to individuals, and I was happy to learn that the real Miranda would get her lavaliere. The box also held a small leather-framed desk photograph of Professor Bulstrode with a younger woman who possessed the squat, pleasantly froggy look that was perhaps a mark of the Bulstrodes and who I presumed was the echt Miranda Kellogg.

Ms. Ping came in while I was on the floor amid the scattered papers. Mutely I handed her the will and told her my suspicions. She sat down and read it, and it was interesting to observe her perfect porcelain face transform itself into the kind of demon mask you see at Chinese folk-dance festivals. It’s not a good thing for a trust lawyer to present a fake will to surrogate’s court. Jasmine had some harsh words about my private affairs, somewhat unjust I thought, but I did not defend myself. She wanted to know how I had let this happen and implied strongly that (although she was too polite to use such language) I had been led around by my cock. She said that my partners would have to be told; I agreed that this was only right. She wanted my assurance that I had not allowed the imposter to lay hands on any part of the estate prior to probate, and here I had to confess that an item of value had indeed gone missing, along with the imposter. I explained what the item was and she informed me of what I already knew, which was that if the genuine legatee wished to make trouble, and should the issue be brought to the attention of the court, then I had committed a disbarrable offense. In any event, I could have no further involvement in any legal matters pertaining to the Bulstrode estate. She glanced at the strewn papers with a look on her face that was not at all pleasant, a disgusted look, as if I had been trolling through the chattels of the deceased in hopes of looting some overlooked piggy bank. With no further discussion she made a call to our office manager to shift some papers ASAP. While she was thus engaged I managed to toss Bulstrode’s appointment diary under my office sofa.

A pair of husky porters arrived, boxed all the Bulstrode papers, and took them away. As soon as my office was empty again I snatched out the diary and riffled through the pages for the weeks prior to his death. In July I found what I was looking for, the twenty-fourth at eleven-thirty: it read “Sh. Ms? Carolyn R. Crosetti.” That had to be it: the fake Miranda had mentioned a Carolyn who was somehow involved and there was the “Sh. Ms” as well. Carolyn R. Crosetti had to be either the seller or the agent for same. I rushed outside to Ms. Maldonado’s desk, made a photocopy of the relevant page, gave her the diary, told her that it was part of the Bulstrode material that had unaccountably been overlooked, and required her to take it immediately to Ms. Ping’s. I believe that this was the first actual lie I had ever offered Ms. M. and it was an even more significant indication of my depravity than the error over the will or Ms. Ping’s resultant disdain. It is bad, very bad, when a lawyer starts lying to his secretary.

Crosetti is not, fortunately, a particularly common name. After thumbing through the white pages for all five boroughs and the surrounding counties, I found only twenty-eight of them, but no Carolyn R. Crosetti. I went back to my office with a list I copied and began to punch buttons on my cell phone. Of course, only the elderly or sick were at home at this hour and I did not wish to leave a lot of messages. For reasons I cannot now recall I had started with the suburban names and closed in on the city from outside. Somewhere in Queens, Ms. M. popped her head in and informed me that Mr. Geller would like to see me right away. I nodded and went on with my number punching. After a spate of answering machines, or empty-house ringing, I got a woman’s voice, a throaty New York accent with a layer of cultivation painted over it. I asked if she knew a Carolyn Crosetti and she said she thought that she knew all the Crosettis in the New York Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area and that there was no such person. Then a pause and a short laugh and she added, “Unless my son married her and didn’t tell me.”

“Who?” I asked.

A pause, and in a more formal voice, “To whom am I speaking?”

At this point I was staring at the page from Bulstrode’s diary and I saw that I had made a slight error. Bulstrode wrote in a loose, nearly medical, scrawl and his appointment for the morning of July 24 had leached over into the line for the previous day. What he had written was not “Carolyn R. Crosetti” but

Carolyn R.

A. Crosetti

I decided to answer the woman semifrankly and said, “My name is Jacob Mishkin of Geller Linz Grossbart and Mishkin. I’m the lawyer for the estate of Andrew Bulstrode and I’m trying to trace a transaction Professor Bulstrode entered into this past July. I’ve located a notation in his diary of an appointment with an A. Crosetti and a Carolyn R. Would you know anything about that?”

“I would,” said the woman. “Albert Crosetti is my son. I assume this is about the manuscript.”

A rush of relief on hearing these words. “Yes! Yes it is,” I exclaimed, and then found myself at a loss for words, thinking now about the various possibilities I had laid out for Mickey Haas. Was I talking to a thief, a victim, or a villain?

“And…?” said the woman.

“And what?”

“And is the estate going to make good the despicable ruse through which your late client cheated my son into surrendering a valuable seventeenth-century manuscript for a paltry sum?”

So this was the victim. “That’s certainly one of the issues open to discussion, Mrs. Crosetti,” I said.

“I should hope so.”

“We should arrange to meet.”

“I’ll have my lawyer contact you. Good-bye, Mr. Mishkin.”

I would have immediately called her again, but my office doorway was now occupied by the stout pugnacious figure of Ed Geller. Now, on paper all the partners of Geller Linz Grossbart & Mishkin are equals, but as often happens in such firms, command flows toward where it is most coveted, and it was the case at our firm that Ed was that coveter and so usually got his way. Besides this, he and Marty Linz were the founding partners and somewhat more equal as a result. Ed was twitching-angry, mainly I suppose because I had not come when called, and so he had to deal with me standing, rather than from behind his desk, which is subtly raised above the normal floor level and surrounded by stuffed legless chairs into which one deeply sinks. I knew better than to stand to my full height now.

I said, “I guess you’ve talked to Jasmine.”

“Yes, I have,” he said. “And could you please now tell me what the fuck is going on?”

“A misunderstanding is all, Ed. I’m sure it’ll be cleared up shortly.”

“Uh-huh. So you didn’t convert a valuable part of our client’s estate to your own use and convey said property to your girlfriend?”

“No. I was the victim of a fraud. A woman presented herself as the legatee of the Bulstrode estate with a will that appeared genuine-”

“This was a will we prepared?”

“No. I assumed it was found with his effects at death. I…we were only retained by the deceased in a particular capacity, which was to hold a document in safekeeping and to advise him on its IP status and the IP status of such other documents that might be derived from it.”

“Derived how?”

I took a deep breath. “It was a seventeenth-century document purportedly written by a man who knew William Shakespeare. Aside from its scholarly value, which was substantial, it suggested the existence of an unknown Shakespeare play in autograph manuscript and provided what might be clues to the present location of same.”

Ed is a great litigator, as I believe I’ve mentioned, and part of the litigator’s art is to never seem surprised. But now he gaped. “Holy fucking shit! And this was legit?”

“Unknown, but Bulstrode believed it was, and he was one of the world’s great experts on the subject.”

“And this property, this seventeenth-century manuscript, is now in the possession of your fraudulent bimbo?”

“I wouldn’t call her my fraudulent bimbo. But, yes it is.”

He ran a hand through his implants. “I don’t understand. How could you have been so stupid? Wait, don’t answer that! You were shtupping this honey, right?”

“Do you want to hear the whole story, Ed?”

“I do indeed. But let’s go to my office.”

Or something to that effect, with rather more obscene locutions. Ed is the sort of lawyer who equates toughness with the liberal use of foul language. On the short walk over, collecting a number of pitying looks from the staff, I briefly considered whether I could withhold any significant facts from one of the best cross-examiners in the New York Bar. No, the painful truth would have to emerge, but not the speculation, and not my plans. When we were ensconced in our assigned places I gave him the basic facts, and after he had drained me to his satisfaction he said that we were going to have to get the police involved and that we had to contact the genuine legatee, Oliver March, and let him know what had happened. I was not to be the one to do these tasks, however. In fact, now that we were on the subject, he had noted a significant slippage in my focus of late and I had to agree that this was the case. We discussed my sorry performance at this morning’s meeting and he pointed out that the proposed merger involved the interests of some important clients and that it was unlikely that I was going to do them much good in my present state. He suggested I think about taking a leave for a while, and then he got avuncular, which he hardly ever does with me, a little like King Kong doing social work instead of wrecking Manhattan, and after a while he got to how sorry he had been when Amalie and I broke up and how he thought that I really hadn’t been the same man since. As soon as he said that, as soon as those words drifted into the air, I felt a sort of balloon pop inside my head and…it’s hard to describe, not really a woo-woo type of out-of-body experience, more of a profound detachment, as if Ed were gabbing away at someone who wasn’t really me.

It was quite interesting, really, in a hideous way, and I thought unaccountably of my mother in her last days and wondered whether this was how she felt: alone in that crummy apartment, kids gone (yes, there was me, but didn’t I make it obvious that it was grim duty alone that brought me to her), a stupid job-why keep going, what was the point? Ed was now talking about turning my work over to various associates-just until you can get back on your feet-and part of that work was, of course, the cell phone ring tones. And this phrase now completely occupied my brain (cell phone ring tones! CELLPHONE RINGTONES!!!), and the force of the absurdity struck me like a pie in the face: here we were, grown men, actual human beings, the crown of creation, concerned with making sure that money would be paid out in the proper way whenever some idiot’s cell phone went bee-dee-boop-a-doop-doop instead of ding-ding-a-ling and this connected in a strange way with the detached feeling and thinking about my mother and I started to laugh and cry at the same time and could not stop for an excruciatingly long time.

Ms. Maldonado was summoned, and she wisely thought to call Omar, who came up and swept me out the side entrance of our suite, so as not to embarrass anyone or frighten the secretaries. On the ride back to my place I asked Omar if he had ever considered suicide. He said he had after his youngest boy had been shot in the head while throwing rocks at soldiers during the first intifada, he said he wanted to blow up himself and as many of them as possible, and there were people in Fatah encouraging that sort of thing then. But he thought it was a sin, both the suicide and killing ordinary people. Dying after you assassinated someone in power was a different story, but no one had ever given him the opportunity to do that. So he had come to America instead.

That afternoon was when I retrieved this pistol I have here from its lair in the back of my utility closet and for the first time seriously asked Camus’s big question, since, unfortunately, I was already in America. I even stuck the barrel in my mouth just to taste the tang of death, and I did a little active imagining, trying to think of anyone who would be at all inconvenienced by my death right then. Amalie would be relieved and free to marry someone worthier of her. The kids hardly knew I was alive to begin with. Paul would be pissed off but get over it; Miriam would up her medication for a month or so. Ingrid would obtain another lover, indistinguishable from me in any important respect. In my will Omar gets the Lincoln and a nice bequest, so he’d be better off as well.

Obviously, I did not at that time pull the trigger, since I am still here and typing. In fact, I recovered from my hysteria fairly rapidly, one of the advantages of being as shallow as a dish. Nor did I go to bed for a week, forgo eating, stop shaving. No, I thought at the time, the Jake persona would click once more into place and I would continue with what passed for my life, only without the ring tones. In the end I think it was curiosity that kept me alive. I wanted to find out how Bracegirdle’s spying went, and to see if that play still existed, and I wanted to meet Osip Shvanov. Yes, curiosity and a mild desire for revenge. I wanted to find out whose little schemes had fucked up my life, and I wanted to get my hands on the woman who had played Miranda Kellogg and played me for a fool.

My appointment with Shvanov was at ten in SoHo, but I had a previous appointment uptown, for I had promised to take Imogen to her rehearsal at the kids’ school. Mrs. Rylands, the drama teacher at the Copley Academy, does Midsummer Night’s Dream every third year, alternating with R. & J. and The Tempest. Last year, Imo played a spirit in the latter play, but this year she has the part of Titania and is insufferably proud. I did not see her perform that spirit because, as I think I’ve mentioned, I do not go to the theater, and not because I didn’t like what they’re showing nowadays. I literally cannot bear to sit in a darkened auditorium and watch live actors on a stage. My tubes close up three minutes after the curtain rises, I can’t breathe, a painful vise clamps around my head, and my digestive system wants to rid itself of its contents from both ends. My sister is obviously correct when she says I need my head examined, a need I decline, however, to satisfy.

I don’t mind rehearsals, though, with the lights up and people moving around and the director calling out directions and actors missing marks and lines. It’s sort of fun and not at all like being pinned, silenced, in the dark, while living people in ghastly makeup pretend they are not who they are; just as I do.

When I arrived at my wife’s house my daughter was waiting on the front steps of the brownstone, chatting with a couple of young men. These had obviously arrived in the white Explorer with gold-plated fittings that stood double-parked on the street with its rear hatch open, the better to share with the neighborhood the thump of its dull chanting music, which was at a volume calculated to shiver stone. She seemed to be having a good time and I was reluctant to break up the party. The young men greeted me politely, for they were from Paul and were keeping an eye on my house, as he had promised. Imogen seemed a little annoyed when I told her this, after we were seated in the back of the Lincoln, since she had thought she was doing something transgressive, entertaining a couple of obvious gangbangers. After this had been straightened out, we rode to the school in silence, at least on my part; Imogen was immediately on her cell phone, speaking to girls with whom she had just spent the entire day and whom she would be seeing in a few minutes. Anything better than a nice chat with Dad.

Well, you know, there is really nothing like Shakespeare, even performed by children. Mrs. Rylands likes MSND because it lets her use children from a range of ages, from the lower as well as the upper schools; her conceit is to use the little kids as fairies and slightly older ones for the major fairy parts, freshmen and sophomores for the royals and the lovers, and the biggest kids for the rude mechanicals. When the boys get to horsing around and cracking up she tells them that the greatest women’s parts in all of drama were created on the stage by twelve-year-old boys, and no one thought it at all ludicrous, and here you are, you big louts, playing men at least! And remarkably, when the golden lines begin to flow from their lips they are able for a moment to leave the shut hell of teenaged narcissism and inhabit a broader, richer universe. Or so it seemed to me. I watched my daughter make her entrance in the first scene of act II and give her great angry speech: These are the forgeries of jealousy. I don’t know where she gets it, how she knew how to speak:

Met we on hill, in dale, forest, or mead, By pavèd fountain or by rushy brook, Or in the beachèd margent of the sea, To dance our ringlets to the whistling wind

and arrange her face and move her body so as to generate a vision of the fairies dancing. Mrs. Rylands was entranced too, and Imogen is a cinch to do Juliet next year at fourteen and shatter hearts.

As I say, I rather enjoy rehearsals and I feel that attending as many of them as I can makes up a little for missing the performances. And the place was full of lovely young flesh and their adorable moms, which was nice too, and I exchanged some melting looks with the moms, and this made me think about Ingrid. I stepped outside after Imogen had finished her scene and called Tarrytown to see if I could come up after my meeting with the Russian, but she was cool and said she had some work to do. I’ve always had a certain skill at detecting lies over the wires and I did now. This wasn’t at all like Ingrid, a fairly straight arrow. Could she have another lover? Probably. Did I care? Yes, a little. I always care, but not all that much; and they can tell, hence the historically rapid turnover in my romantic life.

After the rehearsal I asked Imogen if she wanted to go out for something. In times past, when she was Daddy’s darling, she delighted in being taken to a particular local saloon and having made for her a Shirley Temple festooned with fruity garbage, but no longer. Imogen thinks divorce is boring, practically every one of her peers is what we used to call a child of a broken home, and she rather enjoyed the cachet of being unbroken. Or maybe not. I have no entrée into her lovely little head. We therefore rode home in near silence, although she did tell me that Nerd-Boy had spent the last week or so printing out page after page of genealogical data, so much so that nobody else (that is, Imogen) could use the printer and would I make him stop, Mom gives him everything he wants. I said I would talk to him about it and when we got to Amalie’s I did.

I suppose I had nearly forgotten the task I had set Niko, what with all the excitement, but as I have learned to my sorrow, my son makes regular obsessive-compulsives look like fairies dancing on the beached margent of the sea. I found him up in the computer room arranging sheets of paper on the long trestle table we have there, lining up each sheet precisely square, with all the rows and columns having the same spacing between them. I watched him doing this for a while before I said, “Niko? Imogen says you found something for me. On Bracegirdle?”

“Yes, I did,” said Niko. One of the advantages of hiring a search firm for something like this is that they come in, give you the best answer they found, take their check, and split. But when you ask Niko for an answer, you get the whole story, in exhaustive detail, from the very first effort, with descriptions of the logic involved, plus all the various strategies adopted, sources consulted, false leads exposed, and every last discovered fact displayed. Being a normal human, I will here summarize: Our Bracegirdle had a son, also named Richard, who survived and married and had seven children, of whom five survived into adulthood, and all married and had children. The males tended toward the sea or the army and rose in status to officer rank in the late seventeenth century and through the eighteenth. A Bracegirdle commanded a battery in Wolfe’s army on the Plains of Abraham outside Montreal and another was a captain of fusiliers at Plessy. There were whalers and slavers too, and the bottom line was that the last male descendant of our Richard passed away without issue in 1923, from wounds suffered in the Great War.

Okay, a good idea that didn’t pan out: I was perhaps thinking of a family trove, a box of old papers in the attic that might just happen to be a Shakespeare play that no one knew about. I looked at my son and his useless work and felt a pang of sorrow, and felt also like hugging him, but knew better.

I said, “Well, too bad, Niko. It was worth a try. Have you seen any Russian gangsters hanging around?”

“No. There are two pairs of black guys hanging around. One drives a white Ford Explorer New York license HYT-620 and the other drives a green Pacer, New York license IOL-871. I haven’t finished with the descendants. I just said the males.”

“There are females?”

“Yes. On average, half of all offspring are females. Three of Richard Bracegirdle’s son Richard’s children were female. The eldest, Lucinda Anne, married Martin Lewes in 1681…”

And off we went. I did not pay much attention, I have to say. Being with Niko is often like sitting near a rushing brook, oddly soothing. I was thinking about my coming meeting with the Russian, and also about my crack-up in the afternoon and also about where my next sexual encounter was going to come from, and under all of it was the great pulsing wound of Miranda Kellogg. Niko’s narrative reached its end. He picked up the various neat stacks of paper and carefully stapled them together. He said I had to take them away because his mother said he had too much stuff in his files and he was no longer interested in Bracegirdle genealogy. He turned to his screen, slipped on his headset, and left the building. I found a big envelope, stuffed the papers in it, and left too. I did not see or seek out Amalie, although I was aware of her presence in the house, like a rumor of war.

Rasputin’s is a small chain of semi-fast-food joints started by a couple of Russian immigrants, one of innumerable efforts to find the next pizza. They serve a variety of piroshki, borscht, Russian pastries, and strong tea in tall glasses. The decor is Ye Olde Soviet Union: socialist realist posters, tile floors, servers in peasant blouses and long skirts, steaming samovars, and chunks of Red militaria artfully arranged. The menus are in faux Cyrillic, with the Rs printed backward, and so on. Omar dropped me off at the only one in Manhattan, on Lafayette Street, at five of ten and lurked in the Lincoln on the curb outside, in case our gangster tried any rough stuff.

It was fairly pleasant inside, actually, steamy and redolent of cinnamon and cabbage. I sat under the ornately framed portrait of the eponymous mad monk, a place with my back to the wall and facing the doorway, and ordered a tea and a couple of piroshki. The place was half-full, mainly of local denizens seeking a break from Chinese or Italian or overpriced trendy. At ten past, a man walked through the door and stood in front of my table. I rose and shook his extended hand and he sat down, looking smilingly around the place. He was about my age and half my size, with a thick head of salt-and-pepper hair, a big jut of a nose, and intelligent deep-sunk dark eyes. He was wearing a shearling coat, a black silk turtleneck and fashionably

Oh, what the fuck does it matter what he looked like or what he was wearing? I just came back from a walk around the property. All is silent in the early-morning mists. I checked out the boathouse, the pump house, and the two-car garage, in which I have parked my rented Cadillac Escalade, a vehicle nearly large enough to contain me in the driver’s seat. I can see why these behemoths are popular among the bulky Americans. Next to my rental is Mickey’s Harley-Davidson Electra Glide, which he bought shortly after I got my BMW bike back in the day, to show me, I suppose, that he was a daring fellow too, although I had bought my machine because I could not afford to run a car in the city. A little breakfast and here I am back at the keyboard.

I must have looked around inquiringly because Shvanov caught the look and said, “What, you’re expecting someone else?” and I said I had always imagined that Russian gangsters traveled with an entourage. This made him laugh and show teeth that had been expensively capped in one of the industrial democracies. “Yes, six bullet-heads in black leather and a couple of Ukrainian sluts. Would you like? I can make a call.” He spoke a nearly unaccented English, and made only infrequently the mistakes of article and pronoun omission typical of people whose native tongue is highly inflected. He wished to make small talk, as if we were old friends meeting after a brief separation. I indulged him in this, and we spoke about my sister and her fabulous career and about Rasputin’s and he said he was one of the early investors and I made a crack about had he made an offer they couldn’t refuse.

Here his smile grew a little tighter and he said, “Mr. Mishkin, I don’t know what you think I am, so let me tell you, so we won’t have any misunderstandings. I am a businessman. In past times, I worked for Soviet government, like everybody, but since fifteen years, I am in business. I have interests in Russia, in Ukraine, in Kazakhstan, in state of Israel, and also here. What kind of business, you wish to know. Primarily, I am investor. Someone has an idea, I have the money, and also the contacts. Contacts are very important in Russian community, because this is how we learn to do business in the old days. Trust, you understand? Because we don’t have what you call the business norms, the court system, and so forth. In return for this investment I have a piece of the business, just like New York Stock Exchange.”

“You’re a loan shark,” I said.

“And Citicorp is loan shark, J. P. Morgan Chase is loan shark-what do you think, they don’t charge interest? They don’t take over collateral? This is subprime lending I do, like for this place, no one else would find this money for them, so they come to Shvanov and they give me some piece of this and we are all happy.”

“And if not happy, you have people come and break their legs, which is one thing that distinguishes you from Morgan Chase.”

Again the tight smile and he waved his hands dismissively. “Please, I have no contact with any types of collection business. This is all outsourced to completely different firms, I assure you.”

“Outsourced?”

“Exactly. You buy a pair of Nikes, how do you know who made? Maybe a kidnapped little girl chained to machine in China, they starve and beat her. It says Nike-this is all you know, a respectable firm. I think Nike don’t even know who makes. If you want to be so pure as that you should be in church and not in business. You agree?”

“Not really. And speaking of kidnapped girls, since you bring the topic up, I believe one of your outsourced firms assaulted an employee of mine and kidnapped a young woman from my domicile the other night.”

Shvanov motioned to a waitress and ordered tea and blini. When she was gone, he said, “And why should I do that, do you think?”

“Perhaps you could tell me.”

He ignored this and looked grave. “Kidnapping is a serious offense. You have contacted the authorities, I presume?”

“About the assault on my employee, yes. But not about the kidnap. I would prefer to keep that between us businessmen.”

The waitress brought over his order, much more quickly than she had brought mine. He drank some tea, ate a bite, sighed, and said, “Look, Mr. Mishkin, we are both busy men, so let’s cut to the chase, yes? Here is entire story, my end. This academic fellow Bulstrode comes to me and says, Shvanov, I have a key to a great cultural treasure and I appeal to you as a man of culture to help me find it and restore to world. I need some small monies to do this thing. And I say, of course, Professor, of course, here is some twenty grand, U.S. dollars, you ask if you need more. You understand, even a businessman such as myself has a soul, and wishes not to spend life entirely with bathhouses and piroshki shops and bars with girls, and besides I see it as perhaps a source of substantial cash flow for my firm. So I give him money to explore for this treasure. After this, he leaves country, and I hear nothing. Some weeks pass, and I receive disturbing message from reliable source. This source is saying, the professor has returned and has found this treasure but does not wish to share it with Shvanov. So, what shall I do? I call him and he denies everything: no treasure, it is a dead end. Now, in my business, many times people do not wish to share and I must take strong measures…”

“You had him tortured.”

“Please! I had him nothing. I had nothing to do with any torture, same as President Bush. In any event, my sources tell me that my professor has deposited the papers-which is, I believe, my property-with your firm, Mr. Mishkin, and I hear from my sources that there is heiress showing up, who can dispose of this, and naturally I hope she will do the correct thing and turn these papers over to me. So she joins with you, in a legal manner, and I expect she will soon contact me and we can do business. And now you tell me she has been kidnapped. Of this I know absolutely nothing, so help me God.”

Oddly enough, I believed him, which I never would have had I not known that my Miranda was a fake. I said, “Well, Mr. Shvanov, that puts things under a completely different light. If you are not holding Miranda Kellogg, why are we meeting?”

“Why? Because you are the Bulstrode estate attorney and the estate has something belonging to me; namely, a manuscript of seventeenth century written by Richard Bracegirdle. I have seen this manuscript. I have paid to establish authenticity by scientific tests. I have papers giving me title to it. It is all quite legal and aboveboard. This is not why you came to this meeting?”

I said, “Well, when I had my sister set this up, I imagined that you were trying to obtain the Bracegirdle manuscript by violence and threats.”

“What do you mean, violence and threats?”

“Sending people to steal the manuscript at my residence. Sending people to my gymnasium to menace the proprietor, so that I am expelled from membership. And, as I said, the supposed kidnap of Miranda Kellogg.”

He was shaking his head. He was waggling a finger in the air. “First of all, I have never sent such people to steal. As I have explained, why should I? As to gymnasium, this is some misunderstanding. I only wish to contact you in confidential manner, no threats implied. As I say, is often difficult to control subcontractors. I will have words and reinsert you as desired, with my apologies.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome. Now, how shall I go about to obtain my property?”

“Ah, well, there we have something of a problem. I regret having to tell you that the woman I knew as Miranda Kellogg was not Miranda Kellogg at all, and moreover this woman is missing now, and the manuscript with her. I think we have both been outsmarted by the same person.”

For an instant, Shvanov let slip the persona of a genial businessman and something truly awful flashed out of his eyes. Then it was gone. He put on a rueful smile and shrugged. “Well, this may be true. You win some, you lose some, correct? If you manage to locate her or it I would expect you will contact me, agreed? I have all legal papers to prove this ancient document is my property.”

I said that I certainly would and requested that he do the same. “Naturally,” he said, “and any other papers of same type, of course.”

“What do you mean by other papers?”

“I have some information that when the Bracegirdle manuscript was found there were other historic papers that the people who sold to Bulstrode did not deliver. This is not standard business practice, I think. Tell me, Mr. Mishkin, have you these papers?”

“I do not.”

“Should you come across them sometime, you will recall that they are also my property.”

“I will recall your claim, certainly,” I said, and realized that this was the real reason he had agreed to meet me, the possibility that I had the damned ciphers. I immediately discounted everything he had said.

“Thank you. I believe that concludes our business. A pleasure.”

We shook and he extracted a thick roll of currency from his pocket, dropped a twenty on the table. “For the girl,” he said. “For the rest there will be no charge, my treat.” Then he stared at me, his head cocked and eyes narrowed, as we do when comparing something in our sight with a mental image, and the next thing he said almost knocked me off my chair.

“You know, it is amazing how much you resemble your father.”

“You know my father?”

“Of course. We have done some investments together, and so forth. In state of Israel.” He stood up and added, “The next time you see him, please offer my sincere regards.”

He walked out, leaving me gaping.

THE FOURTH CIPHERED LETTER

My Lord my best obedience to y’r lordship & hartie comendaciouns to you & all youre howse. Tis now long sence I had anie letter from you my lord nor Mr Piggott neither; but you doutlesse hath greater affayres to tend. My newes is that W.S. hath the play finished, that is of Mary Quene of Scotland & hym having told me soe I begged him let me reade it most instant. First hee saith nay let me fayre-copie it mayhap there shalbe correctiones as he oft doth make but I beyng further importunate hee yieldeth. Soe I read hys foule papers. My lord I thinke we hath mistooke oure man: unlese I judge wronglie hee hath not made what wee comanded hym. But you shall see for I have heere wrote down from memorie its burthen & the matter of som speches; for hee would not lett me copie of it even a line.

First comes a prologue that saith this play treateth two grete queenes in contentioun wherein the fate not alone of kingdomes is at hazard but of sowles: with strifes of church oure Englishe state is done/Yet as you pitie her who lost so also pitie her who won. Or some thinge lyke. So has he don. We fancied he would shew Elizabeth arbitrary & tyrannous & he doth; yet sighing for her barren womb & that another woman’s sonne shal have her kingdome, that verie woman that she must slay & he cryes pitie for her lonlynesse who must from policie kill the onlie human creature fit to be her friende.

We fancied he would shew Mary as a goode Christian lady to stir oure anger at her fate & he doth; yet as a lustie recklesse self-destroyer too. She goes into the plot that ruines her with open eies; for (as he tells it) she sees Babbington is a foole, she knows well her messages are reade by Walsingham yet proceeds with the matter all the same. And for why? She despaires of rescue & cares no longer if she be Quene of England or Scotland or anie where if she can but breathe free aire and ride. From her window she espies a gentlewoman a-hawking & wishes to change place with her, trade all her titles for a little breze &c. She repentes her wickedness of former tymes yet thinkes her she is forgiven it by her popish superstitiones. Though a prisoner she vauntes herselfe & despiseth Elizabeth the Quene for her shriveled womb & haveing no venerie & saith Grete Bess thy mayden-hoodee a faster prison be than these my bars. Boastes too she hath hadde love where the Quene of England hath naught but the shewe of it. Further he saith of Quene Mary that the evidence brought gainst her be false in parte; for he saith Mary ne’er plotted the death of Elizabeth but onle wish’d to scape her power & be free. Soe Walsingham sheweth herein as a perjured knave.

On religion: he hath a parte for Mary’s chaplain onne Du Preau who hath contention upon the right faith of Christianes with Sir Amyas & I thinke doth gain the daie if but by a little. He putteth in low clownes, one a Puritan & t’ other a Papist who argue the causes in mockerie. Perhaps these alone be enough to hange W.S. but ’twould be better bolder. The scena wherein Quene Mary goeth to her death is verie affectyng & designed to make who heareth it forget she was a vyle murthering whore. Mayhap this shall pleaze you enough my lord, but the telling I doe is as naught to the heering of it in full, for it be most artful & fulle of witte though I am a poore judge of plaies. But when I am able to sende it shal you judge if it be fit for your purpose. Until then I remayne thy faithful & obd^t serv^t wishing all prosperytie & long lyfe to your gracious lordship London 28^th October 1611 Richard Bracegirdle