The Book of Air and Shadows

15

After Shvanov left I used the cell phone to call Miriam. She was, of course, out and with her own cell phone switched off (I have never once, in more than twenty years, connected with my sister on the first try), so I left a somewhat frantic message. Why? Because no one is supposed to know Dad but the three of us? Ridiculous, but there it was, a feeling of dread.

Around ten the next morning I received a cell phone call from a woman named Donna Crosetti, who said she was representing her brother, Albert, in the matter of certain papers fraudulently obtained by the late Bulstrode. I replied that it remained to be seen whether any fraud had taken place, but that I would be happy to meet with her, or Albert, to discuss the matter, all the while thinking that it was odd for a lawyer to be representing a family member, and odd too was the venue she proposed, a house in Queens rather than a law office. After we had arranged the meeting for that evening, I dialed the number she had called from and was surprised to find it a Legal Aid office. This is yet another indication of how nuts I was then, as in my right mind I never would have agreed to such a meeting.

Meanwhile, my diary helps not at all, as I was now cut loose from my normal office routine. My appointments were cleared indefinitely, which turned out not to be such a good thing. People in stressful jobs are often told to take a rest, but sometimes it is just that stress that has held them together, like the proverbial ancient biplane kept in the air with rubber bands and baling wire, without which it falls from the sky. So, now, in unaccustomed idleness, all the little wheels started to wobble loose or jam up. I paced. I flicked channels. I watched pigeons and traffic out my window. I had a massive coronary…

What it felt like for a moment, but which was only the start of panic: short breath, sweats, tingling in arms, a little dyskinesia. The cell phone buzzed its simple factory-installed tweedle and I grabbed for it like life itself and it was Omar, and would I be going out today? Actually, I would. I had the usual number of friends and acquaintances around town, but there was only one person I thought I could go to after getting fired from my job for malfeasance, which was my wife. So I cleaned myself up, dressed casually but with care, checked my image for corporal signs of depravity, found many, took a Xanax so as not to fret about these overmuch, and away we went uptown. More dummheit! I always forget that my wife understands me.

I believe I mentioned that Amalie runs a financial newsletter out of a small office in our town house. This is somewhat misleading, because there is also an actual office full of gnomes down on Broad Street, and in other offices scattered throughout the planet in the time zones that matter to international money. My wife visits these as infrequently as she can get away with, because it is her fancy that she is a simple wife and mother with a paying hobby, as if she were crocheting pot holders instead of running a multimillion-dollar enterprise. It is something of a joke in the financial district, I am told, but it turns out (ask Mike Bloomberg) that after a while one’s financial information empire more or less runs itself, and the founder’s main responsibility is to resist kibitzing.

Thus I had every reason to believe that Amalie would be free for a nice consoling chat, but when I arrived at the house and was let in by Lourdes, and asked where Amalie was, she told me (with what I thought was excessive satisfaction) that Amalie was not available, that she was having a meeting. I could wait in the living room.

So I waited and fumed and wished for more drugs and got tight in the chest for what seemed like hours, but by my oft-consulted watch was less than forty minutes, until I heard voices in the hallway and sprang up and was able to witness Amalie showing out a trio of suits, who looked at me curiously, as at an exhibit (I imagined): unemployed ex-husband, lurking. Amalie, for her part, showed no surprise, nor did she introduce me to the suits but ushered them graciously out the door.

When she came back, I said, “Big meeting?” keeping the tone light.

“Yes,” she said. “What’s wrong, Jake?”

I related the law firm story in the most pathetic and self-deprecating manner possible, sitting on her/my leather couch while she perched primly on the chair opposite. I omitted only the horrible Russian of the previous evening.

“Poor Jake,” she said when I was finished. “What will you do?”

“I don’t know. Take some time off, think about life. Maybe I’ll look for this lost play.”

“Oh, don’t even joke about that!”

“Why not?” I said. “Where’s the harm?”

“The harm is that one man has been killed over this, according to you, and my children are having to be watched by Paul’s gangsters. I cannot stand to live like this, Jake. I have said to Paul, thank you very much, but please no.”

“What, no one is watching the children?”

“No, and there is no reason for anyone to bother with them because you have nothing they want any longer.” She must have observed something in my face that I was not aware of, because she added, a little more forcefully, “Or so you have led me to believe. Is there anything?”

“No,” I said quickly. “Of course not. They have the original letter already and that was all I ever had. It’s over.”

She kept looking at me as if waiting. At last I said, “What?”

“Nothing. I have nothing to say. You are the one who came to my house.”

“I thought we could talk,” I said.

“Upon what subject? Shall we discuss your new woman?”

“There’s no new woman.”

“That would amaze me. Look, we have had a terrible fight, yet another terrible, shameful fight about your lying and your girls, and now you have ruined yourself in your profession because of one of them, and you come back to me for…for what, I should like to know? Punishment? Shall I stand in the door like a cartoon wife, tapping my foot, with my arms folded, holding a rolling pin? Or take you back? On what basis? That you will act like a mutt dog in heat whenever you please, and I shall be waiting with the lamp in the window?”

I can’t recall what I said in reply. I can’t recall what I wanted from the wretched woman. For the past to be erased, I suppose, for a clean slate. I believe I did actually sink to the level where I appealed to her Christian charity: did she think I was beyond forgiveness? Whereupon she pointed out to me what I knew very well, that there is no forgiveness without repentance, and that I had not really repented; and then stopped herself and cried out that I was doing it again, making her feel like a damned prig and a Sunday school teacher, I am not to instruct my husband as to morals, he is supposed to know all this already.

And so on. Early in our relationship, Amalie had revealed to me that when she was thirteen her beloved dad had been discovered with an entirely separate second family on the other side of the Mont Blanc tunnel, mistress and two daughters, à la Mitterand, very high tone and civilized, of course, no question of divorce, just a continuing slow hell of silent meals and separate bedrooms and the children sent away to boarding schools. Amalie thus had a horror of infidelity, why she fled sophisticated decadent Europe for America the puritan, we are fat and stupid and lack culture but American men are perhaps not such hypocrites about their marriage vows. And married me.

Then she changed the subject, standing up, and pacing back and forth, bent over a little, her hands stuck in the pockets of the cashmere cardigan she often wears while working. She told me that the men I saw going out were from the Dow Jones organization. They had been dickering for Mishkin’s Arbitrage Letter for some time and Amalie had agreed just now to sell it for a figure not quite sufficient to purchase a squadron of air-superiority fighter planes. She added that she was going to sell the town house as well and move to Zurich. Her mother was getting on and was lonely and depressed and it would do her good to fuss over the grandkids, and Amalie was angry at my nation, she did not wish to bring her children up in a christo-fascist empire, that was not what she had bargained for when first she flew the ocean to America the free, and she wanted to devote herself full-time to charitable works in the earth’s more desperate regions. And on cue I blurted out, “What about me?”

It certainly hurts when someone you have loved looks at you with pity, as Amalie did then. Now that I think about it, I should have known then that the love was still alive in my heart, or it would not have hurt so much, I could have remained the cool “separated” man about town like all the others one sees in the parks and tony restaurants on Sundays in Manhattan: uncomfortable, phony-jolly, overindulging the unhappy tykes. She lowered her eyes, as if embarrassed by what she saw, and retrieved a Kleenex from the wad that always lurked in the pocket of her cardigan, wiped her eyes, blew her nose. In my wickedness I thought, Ah, she weeps, that’s a good sign! I found myself begging her not to go, that I would be different, etc. She said she loved me and always would, and wished very much that she could be complaisant, but could not, and if I ever decided to return on terms of perfect honor to my marriage, she would see, and I said, Now, now, I have decided, and she gave me a searching look as only she can and said Oh, no, Jake, I am afraid you have not.

Which was true because just before that moment, when I thought she might roll, I was still thinking that somehow I could retrieve Miranda and clear up our little misunderstanding and have both the old and the new Amalie at my disposal. I can’t stand to type any more of this hideous account of what was taking place in my weasel mind. It doesn’t matter.

What did I do after she had, quite properly, shown me the door? I went to the gym, where Arkady welcomed me with a warm handshake, an embrace, and a false look. God knows what Shvanov had arranged to get me back in there, but it was clear that the easy gym comradeship was over. The word had apparently also spread to the other Russian lifters in the place because I was treated like a radioactive prince, no waits for the benches or machines for me! I pumped iron until I was ready to throw up, then took a painfully hot shower; Arkady’s is known for the dangerous heat of his hot water (there are even cautionary signs), and I wondered if you could accidentally on purpose kill yourself in this way. When I was meat-loaf red I turned the hot faucet off entirely and suffered under the icy drench until my teeth chattered.

I was getting dressed when my cell went off and it was my sister. Without preamble I asked her if she knew that Osip Shvanov knew our father. Sure, she said. They knew each other from Israel. What about it?

What about it indeed? The fact filled me with a particularly infantile kind of fear, where you know you have to keep something hidden from the parent without quite knowing why, only that if they found out they would act out of malice, or worse, some unconscious impulse to claim a chunk of your soul, to innocently eat you up.

“Jake, is there something wrong?”

Honestly, I can’t remember what I was saying that made her say that; I must have been babbling in an uncharacteristic fashion. And it brought me up short, because Miri is rarely interested in what is wrong with her loved ones, there is so much wrong with her that she prefers to talk about.

“Nothing,” I lied. “Look, Miri, have you, like, discussed this whole manuscript thing I’m involved in with anyone? Shvanov? Or Dad?”

“What manuscript thing?”

“You know, I told you about it that night at Amalie’s…Shakespeare, death by torture?”

“Oh, that. I don’t think so, but you know, I don’t keep a meticulous, like, transcript of everything I talk about. Why? Is it supposed to be some big secret? No, don’t leave it there! Move it over by the piano!”

“Excuse me?”

“Oh, they’re delivering something. Look I have to go, darling, these people are going to totally destroy my living room. Bye-bye.”

With that she was gone, leaving me to deal with the probability that my sister had spread the amusing story of how her brother had found the key to a fabulous treasure throughout her wide circle of friends, including quite a few in the demimonde between business and crime. Miri had never much worried about the distinction, which meant that Shvanov might possibly be telling the truth-the city was full of Russian thugs for hire, and those who had attacked me might not have had anything to do with Shvanov’s outsourced violence. But perhaps they did. Perhaps it was a vast conspiracy, watching, waiting to strike, and why had I been so stupid as to come to a gym full of tough Russians? Panic does not really stick in the mind, I believe, it is as transient as smell, although it can be brought back Proust-like by a recurrence of the original stimulus. I am a little batty now, and so I can recall fairly well my irrational desperation sitting half-naked in that wintergreen-smelling locker room. I had the cell phone in my hand and almost without thinking, I dialed Mickey Haas’s number. I left a message demanding that he contact me immediately and I must have sounded crazed because he rang me back about twenty minutes later, while I was waiting at the curb for Omar to bring the car around.

“Lunch?” I said when he was connected.

“This is a lunch call? You sounded like your pants were on fire.”

“It’s a desperate lunch call. I’m being chased by Russian gangsters. I really need to talk to someone.”

“Okay. I had something with my publisher, but I can cancel. You’ll send Omar?”

“I’ll come up. We’ll go someplace new.” Of course they would be watching my usual haunts…

We went to Sichuan Gardens on Ninety-sixth, somewhat to Mickey’s amusement. The place is dim and on the second floor of a commercial block, and I sat with my back to the mirrored wall where I could watch the entryway. To fine my alertness to an even higher degree I had a martini.

“So, Lefty,” he said when we had ordered, “you think Big Max got a contract out on you?”

“This is not funny, man,” I said. “This is not supposed to be my life.”

“No, your life is supposed to be long dull days at the office doing work you don’t particularly like, whose purpose is to render the creative act even more of a commodity than it already is. And chasing pussy in your off hours, looking for the romantic fix that will stay fixed, even though you already found it years ago, and if you did once again convince yourself you found Miss Perfecto, you’d go off chasing pussy again as soon after the wedding as you possibly could, a dreary cycle that will end only when you locate someone sturdy, reliable, and mercenary who will stick around to nurse you through your final illness and collect all the chips.”

“Thank you for your support, Mickey,” I said as icily as I could. “And fuck you very much.”

“Whereas now,” he continued, undismayed, “you’re living the life of a man, every moment rich with import, with danger and excitement. A Shakespearian life, you could say, a life worthy of Richard Bracegirdle. Would you want Hamlet to go back to college and join a frat? Get drunk and party and get a B minus in Scholasticism 101?”

“Doesn’t he get killed at the end of the play?”

“He does, but don’t we all? The choice is only how we live in the previous five acts. Have you come any closer to finding the Bracegirdle original, speaking of spine-tingling excitement?”

“No, and I don’t intend to,” I snarled, since I was being frank with Mickey and did not require any sympathy from him, did not care if he thought I might be in danger, which is why I had mendaciously suggested this possibility to my wife. “I want to have nothing to do with Bracegirdle apart from insuring that Russian gangsters or whoever is after the ciphers leaves me the fuck alone. What about you? Have you penetrated the mysterious manuscript any since I saw you last?”

“No, and I don’t intend to,” he echoed. “Giving something like that to a scholar is like giving a glossy photo of a roast beef dinner to a starving man. It’ll make his mouth water but is devoid of nourishment. Without the original, as I think I’ve said, the text itself is a nullity. Never mind a putative letter from a guy who spied on the man, I could whip up a convincing facsimile of Shakespeare’s personal diary in a spare afternoon, answering questions that have plagued scholars for years. What Russian gangsters?”

Now the whole thing emerged in a rush-Miranda, Amalie, Russians, the law firm, and all. Mickey chopsticked up his spicy beef with buckwheat noodles and listened quietly, as for years I have depended on him to do, as he has on me. When I ran out of words, I asked him for his opinion and suggested that he not just tell me I was fucked up, because I already knew that.

He said, “You’re going to see this Crosetti kid with the ciphers?”

“Yeah, but they think I’m going there to dicker about returning the original that Bulstrode screwed him out of. I have absolutely no leverage on him, except money.”

“That’s always seemed to be a decent enough lever to me. Meanwhile, what do you intend to do with your life? Do you think it’s likely you’ll really be disbarred?”

“Maybe, if there’s a complaint from the heir. I’d have to make restitution, obviously…”

“You ought to go see him.”

“The heir? I can’t do that!”

“Why not? Have a chat, tell him what happened, beat your breast and cry mercy. You know the trouble with you lawyers is that sometimes, in your efforts to be absolutely legal, you forget ordinary human intercourse. What can he do to you? Call you an asshole? You already know that. And maybe you’ll find out something about you-know-what. Maybe Andrew confided in his longtime companion. Anyway, you’ll have a nice talk. You were probably one of the last people to see his boyfriend alive-he’ll probably be grateful for the meeting. And you can return the personal effects. It’d be a nice gesture after your various peccadilloes.”

Yes, it was definitely Mickey who first put it into my head to go to England and talk with Oliver March. Whether I would have gone or not was still in doubt when I left Mickey at the campus, but later events changed that. I felt somewhat better after my lunch. For some reason, virtually every Chinese restaurant in New York has a full bar, even joints that look like they don’t sell a martini a month. I had three, something I had never done at lunchtime before in my life.

The remainder of the afternoon is somewhat blurry. Perhaps there was a discussion of marriage with Omar, me quizzing him on Muslim practices in this area. Was fidelity easier if you had two or three? I can’t recall his answer exactly. We went back to my loft and I had another drink, a scotch, and then a nap. From which I was awakened by the merry dinging of my cell phone, upon which I was sleeping. I punched the green button and it said “You jerk!” in my ear, by which I knew it was my brother.

Clearly, he’d been talking to Amalie and Miri while I was eating and sleeping and had the whole story from both those angles and he let me know what he thought of my recent behavior. “Was that it?” I said after the blast had dissipated. “Because I have an appointment at a child brothel in twenty minutes.”

This he ignored as it deserved, and said

What does it matter what he said, exactly? I was blurred with drink and unpleasant sottish dreams and so I can’t really recall. I think we talked about Amalie and about her asking him to pull his thugs off the case and her plans to leave the country. I was probably rude to him as I so often am, for I have never quite forgiven him for turning out a better man than me, and also I was sick of being lectured by my family about my many defects. I may have asked him about our father, about whether he was connected in some way with Shvanov and his doings. He told me he didn’t know, but it was possible, if any scams were going down. What kind of scams?

He said, this Shakespeare business, dummy. It has all the earmarks of a big con: the secret document, never authenticated and now lost, the priceless treasure, the dupe Bulstrode, the false heiress. It stank of fraud, and since it was a bunch of extremely dangerous gangsters who had been defrauded, it would be a wise move not to get involved any more and to get the word out that I was no longer a player. Something like that. Did I beg him to intercede with Amalie not to leave the country? I may have. As I said, it’s vague.

Hideously clear, in contrast, is what happened during the remainder of my evening. My stomach was acting up, as it always does when I drink to excess during the day, so I made myself some poached eggs, toast, and tea, and around six or so had Omar drive me out to godforsaken Queens, to Ozone Park. It was dark when we arrived at a street of depressing little bungalows, all with vest pocket front yards protected by chain-link fencing and decorated with Madonnas and mirror balls on pedestals. It reminded me forcefully of my Brooklyn roots and my unhappy childhood. I was prepared not to like the inhabitants.

My ring was answered by a thin woman with an Irish kisser and a head full of russet ringlets, wearing a black cotton crewneck and worn blue jeans. A nice freckled face but supplied with the kind of sharp blue eyes it would be hard to lie to. I introduced, we shook. This was Mary Crosetti, mother of. Into the living room: furnishings old, worn, reasonably well cleaned, a middle-class home such as I had been reared in, cared for, but not kept like my own mother kept house, no odor of furniture polish or bleach. A powerful odor of wine, though. Albert Crosetti was a well-fed medium-size fellow with a frank, open face and large dark eyes that seemed to want to be wary if only they knew how. The lawyer-sister, in contrast, was one of us-bright, cool, something of a killer. Pretty and slim, though, another redhead, brighter hair, worn in a schoolgirlish ponytail, fewer freckles than Mom: the sort of woman upon whom my charm does not work. The father of the family had been a cop, apparently, and he stared down at us from one of those awful portraits made from photographs, in which everyone looks stuffed and sprayed with vinyl.

After the preliminaries I told my story, made my confession. Learned they had the ciphers but had made no progress in interpreting them. We then talked about Carolyn Rolly, the woman with whom Crosetti had gone to sell the manuscript to Bulstrode. Rolly seemed like an interesting woman and perhaps a key figure in the affair, and I was about to ask whether anyone had made a serious effort to locate her, when the gangsters came in.

I believe I have already stated that I am not a violent man and that my military experience consists largely in caring for the stricken; my deeds in the events that followed should therefore not suggest that I am anything other than a quite ordinary coward. There was a shot from the street, which I did not identify as such, and then many more ditto. I thought firecrackers, but the Crosettis all rose to their feet and young Crosetti looked out the window. Mrs. Crosetti picked up a cordless phone and dialed 911. I said, inanely, “What’s happening?” No one answered and then some glass broke and three men came running into the living room; to comprehend what happened next you have to understand that we were all in a space about ten feet across.

I recognized them as the men from the street outside my loft, the very big guy, the human-club guy, and the third man. They all had pistols. There were shouts, although neither of the women screamed. I think the thugs were trying to get us to lie down or something, but none of the Crosettis were moving. What I do recall is that the human-club guy came toward me and raised his pistol, as if to hit me on the head, in revenge, I suppose, for my prior ill treatment, and I recall feeling something like relief, because this meant that they were amateurs.

I caught the descending gun in my hand, grabbed his wrist, and wrenched it away from him. He had a surprised expression on his face as I did this, because the movies he had seen, in which pistol-whipping was a common feature, had not prepared him for this obvious maneuver. As my brother has pointed out to me, if you wish to hurt someone and you have a handgun, the thing to do is to shoot them. This is why there are bullets in it, he says, and besides, a semiauto handgun is a fairly delicate piece of gear and not designed for hard contact with a human skull.

Meanwhile, the very large one had rushed over and knocked the phone out of Mrs. Crosetti’s hand. He grabbed her around the neck, with his pistol pointed at her temple. He was shouting something, but his accent was so thick and he was so agitated that I, at least, could make nothing of it. The third man was just inside the living room door pointing his gun around and also shouting. When he saw that I had his pal’s gun he fired a shot at me, but his angle was blocked by the body of that same fellow. I now shifted this weapon into firing position, took a backward step, and turned to face the man who held Mrs. Crosetti.

He was making a good deal of noise, desiring me to drop my gun or he would shoot her, and to make this threat more obvious, he pressed the barrel of his pistol hard against her head. This was another movie watcher repeating what he had learned on the screen, thus ignoring the obvious advantage of any firearm, which is that one can stand off from one’s victim and do damage while the unarmed victim cannot get at you. Mrs. Crosetti knew reality from fiction, however, and so shoved the man’s gun away from her head. It fired harmlessly into the ceiling, whereupon I shot him through the bridge of his nose at a range that could not have exceeded four feet.

Then I was seized from behind by the human-club guy, but at that moment another shot sounded and the man let out a cry and slumped against me, for the third man had inadvertently shot his comrade, who had heroically attempted to grab me from behind and had thus moved into the line of fire. The wounded man screamed in a foreign language (probably Russian) and sat down on the coffee table, collapsing it, and as he opened the target I shot the third man twice in the chest. He dropped to the floor and poured blood.

I would say that about forty-five seconds had elapsed since we heard that first shot. I have an image of myself standing there with the pistol in my hand while the thug from whom I had taken it slowly rose from the splinters of the coffee table. He was holding himself crooked, as if he had aged forty years in that short time. He looked me in the eye and backed away from me, shuffling. My ears were ringing from the shots, but it seemed that there was still gunfire coming from the street, and I wondered, rather abstractly, what was going on. I made no move to stop the man and when he saw my indifference he turned and dragged himself slowly from the room. No one attempted to stop him.

All of that is remarkably clear and burned into my memory, and has formed the theme of many nightmares since: I awake sweating, imagining that I have killed two men, and then it hits me that it is not a dream, that I really have killed them. A uniquely unpleasant experience. It is actually quite difficult to kill someone with a handgun unless the bullet strikes and destroys the heart or the brain, or creates internal bleeding, for pistol bullets are not terribly powerful. A standard 9 mm round generates about 350 foot-pounds of energy at the muzzle, which is no fun if it hits you, but not absolutely devastating, which is why you get those situations where the cops shoot someone forty times. Cops are trained to keep shooting until the target is down, and occasionally it takes that much lead to do it. Rifle bullets are vastly more powerful, and this is why soldiers carry rifles. A 30.06 round hits with nearly three thousand foot-pounds, and yes I am avoiding the next part with this bumf, which I got from my brother during his glorious military career, because the memory is both horrible and vague in that bad-dream way where you imagine that it might even have been worse than you recall, a supposition supported in the aftermath when, from time to time, a mercifully forgotten detail will bob up out of the dark to appall you anew.

So here I am standing amid the gun stink and the Crosetti children are gathered around their mother lifting her to her feet and placing her on the couch and she is absolutely covered in blood and tissue bits from the wounds of the guy whose brains I just blew out. I am looking down at the dead face of the third man: I only shot him twice but obviously I got lucky because he’s clearly dead, the eyes half-open, the face white and slack, the blood pool is huge, the size of a small trampoline. A good-looking guy, late twenties. Well, I don’t care to study him, nor the fellow with his brains spattered over Mrs. Crosetti’s end table, so I stroll over to the window and shift the blinds, and I see a gun battle going on, whose participants are a guy from the black SUV, a man shooting over the hood of a Cadillac hearse, whom I’ve never seen before, and Omar, shooting from behind the Lincoln. Somehow, I can’t get interested in this, it all seems so far away, and now I notice that my knees are shaking so badly that I literally can no longer stand up. I therefore fall into an easy chair. I hear sirens, although at first it is hard to distinguish these from the ringing in my ears. Now there is a transition that I can’t quite recall, although perhaps Mrs. Crosetti asked me how I was doing.

Then, somehow, the room was full of shouting cops, the kind with submachine guns, helmets, and black uniforms, rather like the ones my granddaddy wore. (And how did American police come to dress like the SS, and how come no one objected to it? Or to the Nazi-style helmets our troops now wear? Where are the semioticians when we need them? All bitching about Shakespeare, probably.) Many of these submachine guns were pointed at me and I realized I was still holding the handgun on my lap, like a lady holds a purse at the opera.

I was made to lie prone and I was cuffed, but I did not get arrested, since the person directing the invasion had been a colleague of the late Lieutenant Crosetti and was, therefore, inclined to listen to sense from Mrs. Crosetti, or Mary Peg, as she has since asked me to call her. We are all buddies now, it seems. Ms. Crosetti-Donna-has appointed herself defense lawyer for both me and Omar, and for a hearse driver named Klim, who is also a Polish cryptographer working on our ciphers, as I later learned. Paramedics arrived too and declared my victims dead and carried them off, leaving a truly remarkable amount of gelling blood behind. The police took statements at the scene. Each of the participants went singly into the kitchen and spoke to a pair of detectives, whose names I have forgotten, as I have forgotten the burden of what I told them. They seemed satisfied that I acted in self-defense; I got the impression that Mary Peg disposed of a good deal of authority in the NYPD. The only people arrested were the driver of the SUV and the wounded thug, who had been picked up wandering through the neighborhood some blocks away.

Eventually the police left. They had two fall guys to blame all the gunfire on, and they could not see a way to arrest anyone else without involving the widow and son of a heroic cop. Mary Peg looked at the wreckage of her living room and began to wail and I joined her, quite disgracefully. Klim threw his arms around her and spoke softly in her ear, and Omar did the same for me. In retrospect, the story of the gunfight on the street is obvious. Omar was waiting in the Lincoln when the SUV zoomed up and the three armed men jumped out and ran into the house. Omar grabbed his gun and took off after them, but the driver shot at him, and Omar dived behind our car and returned fire. Then the hearse arrived and Klim joined the fray. Remarkably, none of the three was injured, which shows again how paltry is the handgun for any serious slaughter, except by accident or at extremely close range against the unarmed.

Later, pizzas were ordered and we all sat around the kitchen table and ate them and drank red wine and congratulated ourselves on our survival. Donna Crosetti left, after advising her clients not to talk to the police, and Mary Peg and Albert Crosetti seemed to relax a little, and become somewhat more free in their conversation and their drinking. We had coffee made with generous slugs of Jameson whiskey. The events of the evening retreated a little, and I only burst into tears one additional time, although I was able to slip out to the bathroom before the spasm arrived. Post-traumatic stress is the current term for what you feel when you have killed another human, and it doesn’t really matter if it was justified or not, although murder is the national sport of many of the world’s nations, and thousands upon thousands of people seem to be able to do it without concern or remorse. I will probably never recover from it myself.

Actually, that’s not true. You think you’ll never recover, but you do, or I did. Perhaps there is more of Grandfather in me than I thought. Paul has apparently recovered from a much more extensive career as a killer, although he says he prays daily for the souls of the people he dispatched over in Asia. I don’t really know what this means, “pray for the souls.”

At any rate I emerged from the john, and none of the party adverted to my red eyes. Klim was engaged in an argument with young Crosetti that I found intriguing, in which the Pole made the case that the only thing that would stop what now seemed to be escalating violence was to retrace the footsteps of Bulstrode and to find what he had found, if anything, and if anything, get hold of it. Once the Thing was in hand, of course, and public, there would be no question of anyone needing to commit further acts of violence. If there was Nothing, on the other hand, then we would need to convince the bad guys of this, a somewhat more difficult, but not impossible, task. The important thing was to up the tempo, so that we were not reacting defensively but in control of the game. As in chess.

Crosetti was saying that no, the point was not to get any deeper into it, to stay close to home. If someone wanted the papers they could have them, he wanted nothing more to do with the whole thing. I felt sorry for the kid. I sympathized-I also wanted all of it not to have happened. But I also thought that Klim was right. As long as someone with no morals and access to armed men thought we had a lead on an Item that might be worth a hundred million bucks, then not one of us was safe. Klim thought he could watch over Mary Peg well enough for a short time, and the cops would keep an eye on the rest of the Crosettis, at least for a while, as well as turning up the heat on various Russian mobsters. But that was only a temporary solution, as he pointed out. The tale of the treasure would spread in the underworld, and before long, some other fiend would take a crack at it.

Crosetti at last said, “Okay, let’s say I agree. What am I supposed to do? Wander around England indefinitely? With what for money?”

“You have savings, don’t you?” asked Mary Peg.

“Oh, right! I worked like a dog for that money. It’s for school and I’m damned if I’m going to blow it on some crazy idea.”

“I could cash in some of the IRA,” she suggested.

“What, and live on the pension? That’s nuts! You barely get by as it is.”

“Money is not a problem,” I said, and they all looked at me as if I had declared the Earth flat. “No, seriously,” I said. “I’m loaded. And I would be glad to take Albert to England as my guest.”

THE SIXTH CIPHERED LETTER (FRAGMENT 1)

wherefore I should have anie favour of you? For I have gone against my Kinge but I sweare my Lord on anie thinge you shall name that I knew it not and was betrayed and made traitour by the wiles of my Lord Dunbarton as I have told.

Now shall I relate how came it I was myself betrayed and so to throw myselfe upon yr. Lordship’s mercie. Twas in the winter now passed some days after Candelmas I thinke when I did spie Mr Piggott walking on Fenchurch Street. I made to greet him but he signed me privilie that I should not and he walketh on. Yet I was not to be uzed so for I had been many weekes without word from my Lord D. or indeed Mr Piggott and it vexed me sore that they should slight me thus as I had been to much trouble for theyre plottinges. I followed him and he turned him toward the river at St. Clements Lane and he enters a publicke house called The Lamb, a low dirty dark place and I found me a sweeper lad and gave him a tester and bade him go in and buy him ale and mete with it and sit him as near as he could by Mr Piggott, who I described as well as I could and come out & tell what he had heard and who the man met with if any & if he did well he should have another 6d.

Soe wait I in shadowes under eaves & after a time out cometh the lad and he tells me my man met with Harry Crabbe and John Simpson & they spake low but he heard money passed in a purse. We wait in shadowes & soone out comes Mr Piggott & in a litel comes two ill-favoured men, one with his nose cut off & wore a leather one in its playce & the other a verie beare, black of face but trumperie dressed with a longe yellow plume to his hat. The lad pointeth now privilie, telling these be the men he met with. And what manner of men are these, I asked him, and he replies, Crabbe (he of the false nose) is well-named for he loveth the crabs so much he feedes them on men & this Simpson is called John the Baptist heerabouts, for he baptises in Thames water & better than a bischop too, for those he baptiseth sin no more in this world; by which he meant he drowneth them. Quoth I: did you then heere nothynge of theyre plots? He saith: yea, I heard that the playere must die & Simpson saith ten angels maketh but one angel & must give ten more if you want yon lad Richard in the river bye him & your man agreeth but with bad grace and giveth over more & may you my master, be generous as he. Soe I payde him and left that street much afeared & knowing not where to turn for aide.

With my harte thus confuzed I got me over river to the Globe & set to my taskes there, but verie melancholie & otheres of that company saw & sence there be no company lyke a company of plaieres for gossip I was butt of verie much bayting that day, one saith hee is in love, another nay, he hath learnt he hath the pox, yet another nay, he hath lost all at cartes & shall pawn his cloake & hanger at the Jewes: til I threw a stool at Saml. Gilbourne, and soon thereafter Thos. Pope & I were at daggeres nearlie, when Mr Burbadge and some otheres bade us stop upon feare of ducking, yet we would not & were thrown in the river for oure owen goode.

Then we had the tragedie of Hamlet that after-noone & I was set to plaie a lord attendant on the King & come out with them alle in Actus Primus, scena ii, but when I look out at the groundlings in the penny-places my harte near stopps in my breast for there at the fore stood those two villains from the Lamb & I sware I could not move more than a painted man on a board & missed my cue til Harry Cordell cloutes me in the short ribs to move me on.