The Book of Air and Shadows

19

We were expected at the prison, welcomed even, by the deputy warden herself, Mrs. (not Ms.) Caldwell, a dame of Thatcheresque dimension, polish, and accent. I wondered at the time how long prior to this visit Paul had arranged things. Did he foresee the need to visit prisoner Pascoe as soon as he learned about my involvement with Bulstrode and the various secreted manuscripts? Unlikely, but it would not entirely surprise me. As I noted, Paul is very smart, and subtle with it. His predecessors in the Society of Jesus used to run whole nations, so that outsmarting a bunch of Russian thugs, even Jewish ones, might not be a major challenge. Is that a logical statement? Perhaps not and perhaps also a little reverse anti-Semitism in there: Jews are smart, therefore tricky, got to watch yourself around them, jew still a verb in many parts of my nation, nor am I immune to the cozy embrace of casual anti-Semitism. Rather the opposite, in fact, as Paul has often pointed out.

The prison was a class D facility, which is what Her Majesty calls her minimum-security facilities or, as we might say, her country club joints. Springhill House had actually been a private home at one time and all in residence were, according to Mrs. Caldwell-Thatcher, rehabilitating themselves fit to be tied. And of course we could see Mr. Pascoe, a model prisoner. Take as long as you like.

Pascoe was a small, unattractive little man, carefully dressed in a blue silk shirt, a fawn lamb’s-wool sweater, tweed slacks, and polished slip-ons. His small monkey eyes shifted behind thick clear-rimmed eyeglasses and he wore his thin hair (dyed a deplorable shade of yellow) swept back to his collar. He spoke in what Brits call a posh accent and suffered from the sin of pride. It was Paul’s religious duty to point this out and offer the opportunity for repentance; I’m sorry to say he did not, but exploited it, for our advantage. Or for the greater good, depending on one’s point of view. As I say, a subtle fellow, my brother.

We met in Pascoe’s room, a comfortable nest that could have been in one of those cozy-shabby hotels the English seem to like. The furniture was dorm-room institutional, but Pascoe had tarted it up with framed pictures and manuscript reproductions, an art deco bedspread, colorful throw pillows on his bed, and a worn Oriental carpet, perhaps genuine. He reclined on a pile of these pillows while we sat upon straight chairs. He made tea for us, fussing.

We began by discussing old Bulstrode. Pascoe had heard of his death and was avid for more information, which we supplied, although we did not deny the police theory that he had fallen prey to rough sex. Then there was some business I didn’t then understand about “was the payment through” and Paul said it was and handed him a slip of paper, which he examined, folded, and put away. After this he leaned back in his cushions like a pasha, folded his long delicate hands, and looked dreamily up at the acoustic tiles.

And proceeded to tell us exactly how he brought off the scam: that is, he told us that the Bracegirdle manuscript was a forgery (here he included copious detail about the source of the paper, the recipe for the ink, how to fake or subvert dating technology, etc.) and that someone, who he did not name, had contacted him, given him the text, and provided him with the appropriate materials. In prison? I asked. A piece of cake, Father. I could run ten-pound notes off in this rest home and no one would be the wiser. He’d done the job and smuggled the pages out and payment had been received. He’d also advised his mystery client about how to run the scam. The important thing was to string it out, make the mark work a bit, so that he thought he’d found it himself. So your first hint had to be produced into evidence as coming from an old book or books before a naive witness through legerdemain; and afterward bring in Bulstrode, the expert.

Why Bulstrode? Pascoe laughed nastily at this: once bitten twice shy is a load of bollocks, my son. Your best mark is a man who wants to recoup his loss-the poor bastards never learn. Prompted by Paul’s questions, he described just how he generated the supposed ciphered letters (nothing more intriguing than a cipher, gentlemen, as I said, you want to give the marks something to do), including the “discovery” of the indispensable grille, and then, almost smacking his lips, he laid out how to arrange the finding of the long-hidden treasure. He went into a lot of detail, which I will not repeat here, but it was highly convincing, and amazingly intricate. The forger’s agent within the camp of the mark-for this too was vital, and it had better be a bird, a little crumpet never hurts if the mark gets iffy-this girl would contrive to deliver the Shakespeare manuscript into the hands of the mark. Who would then sell it to the real mark, the moron with the money. Because, needless to say, you could only pull off something like this with illiterates. You couldn’t actually forge a Shakespeare play-the merest junior don would catch you out-so you had to find someone with more gelt than sense, d’you see, and then there had to be a secret transfer, the manuscript for cash, and goodbye. The final act was the girl swiping the cash from the original patsy-a trivial operation-and there you have it.

And we did have it, on my little machine. Paul had been insistent about that, even going so far as insuring that the batteries were freshly bought ones. After Pascoe wound down, Paul said, “Well, let’s see what you can do,” and brought from his briefcase some folio sheets of what appeared to be old paper, a small glass bottle of sepia-colored ink, and three goose quills. Pascoe’s face lit when he saw them, as a mom’s might at the sight of her baby, and he quickly rose, took the material, and sat at his little desk. He examined the paper carefully, holding it to the light of his desk lamp, and made sounds of appreciation. Then he opened the ink bottle, smelled it, tasted it, rubbed a drop between his thumb and forefinger.

“Marvelous stuff,” he said at last. “The paper is genuine seventeenth century and the ink’s tallow soot and oxgall. I assume the ink’s extracted from old documents?”

“Of course,” said Paul.

“Brilliant! Wherever did you get it?”

“The Vatican Library,” said Paul. “A deaccession.”

Pascoe grinned. “Well, that’s one word for it,” he said, and without further speech set about trimming the goose quills, using an X-Acto knife Paul provided. While he was doing that, Paul brought out what I recognized as a page photocopied from our Bracegirdle ms. Pascoe readied his quill and, after testing it on some scrap paper, set to work. We sat. Paul took out his breviary and mumbled. It was like an afternoon at a Benedictine scriptorium, without the bells.

“There!” said Pascoe, handing over the page. “What d’you think of that?”

We looked. He had copied the first ten lines of the Bracegirdle ms. three times in all, the first one rather crude, the second one much better, and the third indistinguishable, to my eye at least, from Bracegirdle’s own hand.

It seemed to satisfy Paul as well, because he began to put all the things we had brought, including the forgery practice page, back into his portfolio. Pascoe watched the paper and ink vanish with an expression of longing.

I waited until we were back in the Merc before I spoke. “Would you mind telling me what that was all about?”

“It’s a forgery. I told you before, the whole thing is an elaborate scam.”

“So it seems. What was that at the beginning about a payment?”

“Pascoe has a boyfriend and wants to keep him provided for. That’s why he did the forgery and that’s why he spoke to us. I arranged for the boyfriend to receive a nice check.”

“You’re abetting unnatural acts?”

“Not at all. Mr. Pascoe is safe in prison and incapable of doing any but solitary unnatural acts. He shows a laudable concern that his honey not be forced to go out on the streets as a rent boy, and wishes to support him. I believe it’s simple charity to help him out.”

“You really are a perfect hypocrite, aren’t you?”

Paul laughed. “Far, far from perfect, Jake. The interesting thing is that this young fellow our Pascoe is supporting in luxury is the same one whose testimony landed him in jail after that Hamlet thing.”

“And how did you figure all this out?”

“Oh, I have contacts. The Society of Jesus is a worldwide organization. I had someone go talk with Pascoe and out came the story, perfect confidentiality of course, and I approached Pascoe by phone before we left.”

“So what do we do now?”

“The same thing we would have done if the thing were genuine,” said Paul. “Go through all the hoops, get the fake play, and deliver it to the bad guys. That gets you and yours off the hook.”

“And what about the bad guys? What about Bulstrode and whoever sent the people I shot? They get a free pass?”

“That’s up to you, Jake. You’re an officer of the court, I’m not. My only interest is in making sure this whole mess goes away.”

The car was now moving in the direction of Oxford, and Mr. Brown informed us that we had been followed to the prison and were still being followed. Paul was pleased at this, as it would confirm to the bad guys that we had actually been to see Pascoe and would add an important detail to our forgery story. What was I thinking of after these revelations? I was plotting about how to use them to secure another meeting with Miranda Kellogg or whoever she was. I have described my Niko as an obsessive-compulsive, and he is, poor little guy, but, you know, the apple does not fall far from the tree.

I pulled out my cell phone and dialed, not because I particularly wanted to speak with Crosetti, but as what psychologists call a displacement activity. Animals, for example, lick their genitals when placed in anxious situations, but higher animals reach for a ciggie or, latterly, their cell phones. I was annoyed to receive a recorded message that the cell phone customer I was trying to reach was unavailable. Was the man really so stupid as to have turned off his phone? I disconnected and made another call, booking a suite at the Dorchester: for people like me spending lots of money is another sort of displacement activity. During this ride, we managed to transfer the recording of the conversation we’d had with Pascoe to my laptop and thence to a CD, which Paul took. I forbore to ask.

They dropped me off at the hotel some hours afterward. The atmosphere in the car had been fairly chilly and unrelieved by any dramatic confrontations. We discussed security. Mr. Brown assured us that his people would be watching over me in the city as well.

“This must be costing a fortune,” I observed.

“It is,” said Paul, “but you’re not paying for it.”

“What? Surely not the law firm?”

“No. Amalie is.”

“Whose idea was that?”

“Hers. She insisted. She wants us to be safe.”

“And to get a report on all my doings too, no doubt,” I replied, with an uncharacteristic nastiness. Paul ignored this as he so often does my remarks in this tone. We shook hands, or I tried to shake hands, but he embraced me, something I don’t much care for. “It’s all going to work out fine,” he said, smiling with such a good humor that I was forced to allow my own face to break. I hate that about him. Mr. Brown, at least, was content with a brief shake, and then they were gone into the confusing British traffic.

My room was blue, elaborately upholstered the way the Dorchester does, tufts upon tufts, no swaggable space unswagged. I called Crosetti again, with the same result, had a scotch, and another, and made some business calls setting up appointments for the next several days. Our firm was representing a large multinational publisher and the meetings were about European Union handling of digitized text and the royalties pertaining thereto. It was exactly the sort of grindingly dull legal work I have specialized in, and I was looking forward to being as grinding and dull as I could manage with a group of colleagues compared with whom I am Mercutio.

Every so often during the next day I called Crosetti, with no luck. The first evening, after a dull supper with several international copyright lawyers, I briefly considered hiring one of the elegant prostitutes for which that part of London is justly famous, a leggy blonde, perhaps, or a Charlotte Rampling type with a sly smile and lying blue eyes. But I declined the tempt; I might have enjoyed the in-your-face defiance of Amalie’s unseen watchers (and their employer, of course), but against that I knew that it would not be particularly pleasurable and that I would be suicidally depressed afterward. This was a demonstration that I was not doomed always to take the most self-destructive option and it made me feel ridiculously pleased with myself. I slept like the just and the next morning at breakfast received a call from Crosetti.

When he said he was at Amalie’s place in Zurich I experienced a stab of rage and jealousy so intense that I almost upset my orange juice glass and at that same instant I recalled in detail my conversation with him at the bar of my former hotel. In the vile sexual phantasmagoria that my domestic life has become, I have never crossed a particular line, which I know is one that many philandering husbands flit by without a thought, and by this I mean projecting one’s sins upon the injured wife, either accusing her of infidelity or subtly encouraging a self-justifying affair. “Everyone does it” gets you off the moral hook, and then we can all be sophisticatedly depraved. Had I really encouraged Crosetti? Had he really taken me up on it? Had Amalie…?

Here I felt the moral universe tremble; my face broke out in sweat and I had to loosen my collar button to drag enough air into my lungs. In the sickening moment I understood that my excesses were made possible only because my mate was the gold standard of emotional honesty and chastity. If she were proved corrupt then all virtue would drain from the world, all pleasure become dross. It is hard to express now the real violence of this perception. (And, of course, like many such, it soon faded; this is the power of what the church calls concupiscence, the force born of habit-and the Fall of Man, if you want to get theological-that drags us back into sin. An hour later I was both mooning about Miranda and giving the eye to a fresh young assistant at my first meeting.)

After some long seconds, I rasped into the instrument, “Are you fucking my wife, you guinea son of a bitch?” quite loud enough to turn heads at nearby tables in the Dorchester’s elegant breakfast room.

To which he answered, in a shocked tone, “What? Of course not. I’m with Carolyn Rolly.”

“Rolly? When did she turn up?”

“In Oxford. She’s on the lam from Shvanov’s people.”

“And you decided to shelter her with my wife and children, you asshole!”

“Calm down, Jake. I thought it was a good move. Why should they look for her in Zurich? Or me, for that matter? Meanwhile, there’ve been some developments…”

“I hate this! Get out of there and go someplace else!” Incredibly stupid, I know, but the idea of Crosetti sharing a house with Amalie got under my skin.

“Fine, we’ll stay at a hotel. Look, do you want to hear this…it’s important.”

Grumpily, I told him to spit it out. It was quite a story. The long and short was that Rolly had smuggled a copy of the grille away from the bad guys and they had been able to decipher the spy letters. I am trying to recall what I felt when I heard this and I suppose the answer is, not that much, because I knew the whole thing was a fraud. I told him to e-mail me a copy of the decipher and asked, “So, does it locate the play?”

“It says he buried his copy, and waits for an answer from Rochester. He was double-crossing Dunbarton and wanted to use the play as proof of the plot. He may have gotten his answer and dug up the play and then who knows what happened to it?”

“Wait a second-one of the ciphered letters was to someone else?”

“Yeah, the Earl of Rochester, the man Dunbarton was conspiring against. Dunbarton apparently got caught plotting and decided to cover his tracks by whacking both Bracegirdle and the Bard. Bracegirdle panicked and tried to rifle the playhouse strongbox to fund his getaway, got caught, confessed all to Shakespeare, and they decided to blow the whistle. There’re some pages missing from this letter but it’s still pretty clear. Shakespeare knew some high-level people who could vouch for the whole thing and they wrote the letter in the same cipher.”

“And they weren’t afraid that Dunbarton might get hold of it and read it?”

“No, that’s the beauty of his cipher: all you needed was a grille, which is easy to copy, and a reference to a page in the Breeches Bible and you’re all set, but unless you have the page to start on you’re out of luck. He must’ve hand-delivered the grille, the ciphered letter, and the page reference to one of Rochester’s people and…”

I didn’t care about the details and said so, adding, “So we still don’t have the whereabouts of the play?”

“No. He wrote that he has the directions where they’ll be safe, whatever that means. Apparently you also need that range finder he invented.”

“Oh, good. I’ll check out Portobello Road. So that’s it? A dead end.”

“It looks like it, boss, unless someone has retained a trove of Bracegirdliana. On the other hand, this is still the biggest find for Shakespeare scholarship since forever. It should be worth a bundle to the Folger.”

“Yes. And what are your plans now?”

“Back to New York, I guess. Carolyn owns the ciphers, so she’ll want to sell them. Amalie said you knew a big-time Shakespeare scholar…”

“I do. Mickey Haas-what about him?”

“Well, maybe you could ask him to handle the sale-in exchange for first look and all that.”

“I’d be glad to. And if you want to return with me, we’ll be leaving late on Thursday, day after tomorrow, from Biggin Hill. And, Crosetti? Forget about what I said about Amalie and about leaving the house. I’m a little nuts nowadays.”

Why didn’t I tell him at that moment that it was a fraud? I can’t recall, but it must have been the fear that if I short-circuited the denouement of the scam I would not get to see Miranda again. Perhaps more than a little nuts.

I went to my meetings, had my flirt, as I’ve said, and a charming dinner with Miss Whoever-Someone, but I put her in a cab with a mere handshake, unmauled. The next day I met Paul for breakfast in the Dorchester and handed him the printouts of the e-mail Crosetti had sent. He sat and read them while I sipped coffee. When he was done I asked him what he thought.

“Brilliant,” he said, “I almost wish it were real.”

After that we talked about Mickey and the dead Bulstrode and the scholarly life, and about Mary, Queen of Scots, and how no one was able to actually pin down what she’d actually done. Had she really conspired to kill her husband, Lord Darnley? What had possessed her to marry a maniac like Bothwell? Did she write the incriminating letters that plotted the assassination of Elizabeth? Why did she never, in the entire course of her life, stop to think?

I said I didn’t know-it was all Masterpiece Theatre to me. It wouldn’t be the first time, however, that the fate of nations swung on someone wanting a piece of ass to which they were not strictly entitled.

“Yes, but what would Shakespeare have made of her? I mean he had absolutely nothing to work with on Cleopatra and Lady Macbeth and the women in the history plays and here he had loads of material, and it was all about something that happened in his grandparents’ time. He must have heard people talking about it when he was a kid, especially in a Catholic part of the country like Warwickshire.”

“Well, we’ll never know, will we? Speaking of conspirators, have you heard from the Russians?”

“Not a peep. I can’t believe you’re not interested in this. You’re supposed to be the romantic one in the family.”

“Me? I’m the prosaic one. Intellectual property law? You’re the war hero. And priest.”

“The most antiromantic profession.”

“Please! There’s nothing more romantic than a priest. The unobtainable is the essence of romance. That’s half of what brings the suckers in, the fascination with celibacy. Plus you guys get to dress up as women without looking ridiculous.”

“Or not very ridiculous,” said Paul, grinning. “Although as I recall, you were the one who used to dress up in Mutti’s clothes.”

“Oh, now you’re definitely trying to drive me crazy. I never dressed up in-”

“Yeah, you did, you and Miriam were always going through her bureau. Ask her if you don’t believe me. She sends her love, by the way.”

“Where is she?”

“In transit. She called last night. She wanted to know what we were up to, but didn’t want to seem prying-you know how she tries to weasel stuff out of you when you’d be perfectly willing to tell her if she’d just ask up front?”

“Yeah, and getting anything out of her is like picking crabmeat. Does ‘in transit’ mean she’s in Europe?”

“So I gathered,” said Paul vaguely. “My impression was that she’s on her way to see Dad.”

“How about you? Going to join them?”

“I might, as long as I’m here,” he said, with his annoying smile.

“All forgiven, is he?”

“It comes with the job.”

“And he’s all apologetic for what he did?”

“Not in the least. He’s never said a word to me or Miri about that time, or about Mother. He thinks I’m a jerk and a clown and treats Miri like a servant. As far as I can see he hasn’t changed one bit since Brooklyn, except he’s older, richer, more corrupt, and boinking successively younger women. Oh, and of course, politically he’s a total fascist, way to the right of Kach. Death to the Arabs, Sharon a sellout, the usual.”

“Charming. Paul, why the hell do you waste your time with him?”

His turn to shrug. “Filial duty. Or so Miri doesn’t have to carry the whole load by herself. Or maybe I have hope that he’ll put himself in a position where I can give him what he needs.”

“What would that be?”

“I’m not sure. Penitence and reconciliation? My prayer is that I’ll know it when it happens. In the meantime, he’s my father, and although he’s a nasty bastard he’s still part of me, and it does me good to see him every once in a while. You should try it sometime.”

I said I’d pass on that and he didn’t press me. He never does. I can’t recall the rest of the conversation and I had left my little machine in my room, but I vividly recall the next time I saw my brother, which was when he burst into my room at about ten that evening with the news that my children were missing.

Of course, Amalie had called me first on my cell, but as you have probably gathered by now, I dislike them intensely and always turn mine off during meetings and this evening I had forgotten to turn it back on, and I also recall that I had neglected to inform her I was staying at the Dorchester instead of my usual Knightsbridge place. Therefore, she could not get ahold of me and called Paul instead.

I immediately called her, of course. In a curiously dead voice she told me the story. Amalie had taken the children ice-skating near her house. Ice-skating is Niko’s sole athletic activity, so his mother is always ready to take him to the rink. He typically skates in tight obsessive circles, staring down at the ice. Imogen is a fair figure skater and loves any sort of showing off. They went out with Crosetti and his girlfriend and afterward had their hot chocolate at Zic-Zac. The kids finished and ran outside to wait, the way kids will, especially if their mother thinks they are rude American barbarians not fit to be served in even a low-end Zurich joint. The adults finished their coffee and pastries, and when they emerged the kids were gone. A bystander told her that a sedan had pulled up to the curb, a blond woman had stuck her head out the window, engaged them in conversation, and they had both jumped into the car willingly. She assumed that they knew the woman in the car, or she would have given the alarm. Of course, my first thought was that it was Miranda, and I have to confess that for a brief moment I felt a kind of joy-even though she was a criminal who had kidnapped my children, she was in a way back in my life, I might see her again!

“I’ll come right over,” I said to my wife, “I can be there by seven.”

But she said she didn’t want me. She said I should have been there already, that it had happened because I wasn’t there, because I had broken up the family and let nastiness into what should have been the safe refuge of our home, and do you now pretend to offer me comfort? I don’t want your comfort. You have no comfort to give. And now that your children have been taken by gangsters you will be even more free to do whatever it is you want, and do you want to know what I feel? I feel I was so foolish as to want to raise children with a man like you, I thought yes, I could fix it all with love, I could spread a blanket of love around all of us so that in this frightful world there would be one corner that would be for us alone but no, you didn’t want this, you tore it to pieces my poor little blanket and now what will you do, Jake, on what basis will you mourn for your children? Will you even miss them very much? I don’t even know that and so how can you come and sit with me and give me comfort?

And a good deal more in this vein, with me making excuses and defense and for God’s sake Amalie what are you doing? Have the police been notified? And all sorts of operational stuff that I wanted her to focus on, not to mention the thought (which I was not ready to share with her) that the only reason anyone would have snatched my kids was to trade them for the Item. Which I had not got, and had not much hope of getting if Crosetti was right, and on and on talking past each other like people in a postmodernist play, and eventually she said she didn’t want to talk with me at all anymore and asked to speak with Paul. I gave him the phone and sat on the bed, dull and paralyzed, staring at the desk, which happened to be in my direct line of sight. The desk was covered with neat stacks of paper and folders in various colors into which I was arranging the results of my recent legal work, my laptop computer glowed invitingly and the demons put into my mind the thought that oh, well, I still had my work; no family, shame about that, but still…and then followed the realization of what my work actually was, at which point I went matagalp, as I believe they call it in the Philippines.

I let out a howl like King Kong and began to tear the room apart. I overturned the desk, the chair crashed into the mirror, the laptop went clattering into the bathroom. I threw a fairly heavy Regency armchair through the window and was trying to toss all the papers and my briefcase after it when Paul tackled me. I am, of course, much stronger than he is, but he managed to get me in a painful hold of the type used to disable sentries and after a few seconds of painful, futile struggle my rage collapsed into sobbing. I believe I screamed and cried for some time and then the police came because of the broken window, but Paul was able to deal with that, since priests are nearly always given the benefit of the doubt.

Some hours later, having Xanaxed myself into dull apathy, the expected call came through. Paul took it on the hotel phone and handed it to me. The voice was accented, Russian maybe, but not Shvanov’s. This person was not threatening in any way, explained that he was not a barbarian, that my children were safe and comfortable, not taped to chairs in abandoned factories or anything, and neither you nor your wife was going to be so foolish as to involve the police. I assured him we would not. He said that all this could be handled in a civilized way, since I surely knew what they wanted, and that as soon as I had obtained it I should place an ad on such and such a Web site and they would contact me, and when I said I had no idea where the goddamn thing was he said, we’re patient and we have confidence in you and broke the connection. Nearly as soon as I hung up, my cell phone made the noise it makes when there’s a message waiting and I went into my mailbox and there was a photo of both kids smiling and a message from Imogen: “Hi, Dad, we’re okay and healthy and not getting tortured like in the movies. Don’t worry, okay?” Proof of life, they call it, very professional. And she really did sound okay.

Okay, fast-forward a little. Paul’s gone. He wanted to stay and talk but I kicked him out, mainly because he was taking the kidnapping worse than I was and I had no taste for his empathy. I’m alone in the wrecked suite. The management has placed heavy plastic over the window, but I told them I would pick up the place myself, to gather my important confidential papers. Money has been liberally schmeared among the staff. I am actually gathering up the papers and stuffing them any which way into my briefcase, when my eye falls on a thick pack of printouts that I don’t immediately recognize. On closer inspection I see it is the genealogy of the Bracegirdles that Niko prepared for me. I am about to toss it in the can when I notice that it’s the female branch, the one I never looked at. I sit on the edge of the bed and leaf through the stack and learn that Richard Bracegirdle has one surviving female relative in the direct line, a Mary Evans, born 1921, in Newton, Maryland, and still there residing.

It’s 9:30 P.M. here, afternoon on the East Coast. I get the number and make the call. A woman’s voice. No, she’s sorry to say Miss Evans is deceased. Recently deceased. My speaker is Sheila McCorkle, and she’s a church lady from Miss Evans’s church, a Catholic church, of which the late Mary had been a pillar. Mrs. McCorkle is helping to clean out the place, and my! Isn’t there a lot of old stuff! I say I’m calling from London, England, which impresses her, and I ask her if she has disposed of any of Miss Evans’s possessions. No, not yet. Why? I tell her that I am the lawyer for the Bracegirdle family and would like to inspect Miss Evans’s home to see if there are any important memorabilia extant, would that be possible? It would, she supposes. I get her home number and make an appointment for the following day.

Well, I was crazy, I suppose, to believe in such a long shot, but did not the great La Rochefoucauld say that there were situations so dire that one had to be half-crazy to get out of them alive? I called Crosetti and told him to get ready to move to London on my call, because I had a lead I was following up over in the States, and if it paid out I would need someone in England. A brief pause on the line. Shouldn’t he stay with Amalie? I said that this might be our only chance to get our hands on the Item, and that this was perhaps more critical to getting my kids back than any comfort he could give my wife. We made the arrangements and then I hung up on him and called our pilot.

By six the next morning I was in the air flying back across the Atlantic. We had a tailwind and made it to Baltimore-Washington Airport in slightly over seven hours. Three hours after that I was pulling my rental Lincoln up to the front of a modest frame house sitting white and weathered under leafless oaks and dogwoods, in Newton, Maryland. Mrs. McCorkle proved to be a stout fiftyish lady with a homely open face, dressed in country work clothes, an apron, and gloves. Inside, the place had the burdened atmosphere of a long life eviscerated by death. The cartons were out and Mrs. Mc. was valiantly trying to separate the salable from the junk. Miss Evans had been, she told me, a spinster (she used that now very unfamilar antique word), a sad case, had a fiancé once who didn’t come back from the war, had a father who lived too long, she took care of him, never married, poor thing, and yes, she was a Bracegirdle on her mother’s side, Catholic of course, from an old family she said, they came to America in 1679, one of Lord Baltimore’s Catholic shiploads, well, she could believe the old part, look at all this stuff, it looked like they hadn’t got rid of anything since 1680! Feel free to look around. Over there near the fireplace is the stuff I thought would sell. Her will left everything to St. Thomas’s, which is why I’m here.

I looked at the box of books first. An old Douay Bible, crumbling leather, inside it a family tree going back to Margaret Bracegirdle, the original emigrant. Margaret had obviously married in America, and her sons and daughters had married, and the name was lost to the record books but not to memory, for there were numerous among the family tree who bore the ancestral name: Richard Bracegirdle Clement, Anne Bracegirdle Kerr…

Putting the old Bible aside I dug deeper in the carton.

It was a quarto, of course, its red full-calf binding leather nearly black with age and the covers and the endpapers foxed and swollen with damp, but the pages were all there, the binding was intact, and the name on the flyleaf in faded sepia ink was “Richard Bracegirdle” in the familiar hand. An edition of 1598, I noted, as I flipped through the front matter. Genesis was marked with tiny pinholes. On the back flyleaf were inscribed in that same hand a string of letters in fourteen uneven rows.

I closed the book with a snap. Mrs. McCorkle looked up from her sorting and asked if I had found something I liked.

“Yes, I have. Do you know what this is?”

“A Bible, it looks like.”

“It is. It’s a Geneva Bible, from 1598. It belonged to Richard Bracegirdle, an ancestor of your friend.”

“Really? Is it valuable?”

“Well, yes. I suppose that it might fetch twenty-five hundred dollars at retail, because of the damage. It’s not a perfect copy, and, of course, this particular translation was used by practically every literate person in England for eighty or so years, so there are a lot of them.”

“Lord! Twenty-five hundred dollars! This is like Antiques Road Show.”

“Almost. I’m prepared to write you a check for twenty-five hundred right now, which is a good deal more than you’d get from a dealer.”

“That’s very generous of you, Mr. Mishkin. Could I interest you in some nice Fiesta ware?” We were all smiles now.

“Not really, but there is another item I’m looking for, mentioned in some old family papers, a kind of old surveying instrument, made of brass…?”

“Surveying instrument? No, I don’t think so. You mean one of those things with a tripod and a little telescope?”

“Not necessarily. This would have been portable, maybe a yard or so long, and a few inches across, like a big ruler…”

“You don’t mean that?” She pointed. Dick Bracegirdle’s invention was hanging above the mantelpiece, softly gleaming, kept and polished by generations of his female descendants, ready for use.

Or a concoction of the scam artists, I should say. Once again, I was impressed with the intricacy of the plot. Had Miss Evans been involved in some way? Had they actually found a real descendant of Richard Bracegirdle, or had they begun with this old lady and built up the whole fraud around this antique instrument and an old Bible, and invented an ancestor to suit? Even a master of the involved lie such as myself could not help admiring the clockwork detail.

At Baltimore-Washington Airport, I went into one of those lounges they reserve for the prosperous traveler and called Crosetti in Zurich. I told him what I had just bought and then I used the computer facilities to scan and send off to him via e-mail the cipher from the flyleaf of Bracegirdle’s Bible. He said he would run it through his solution program and get back to me. I had a coffee and some snacks and killed an hour or so, and then he called me back, and not with good news either. The cipher did not solve with the Bible and grille key that had been used for the letters.

“Why would he have done that?” I asked Crosetti. “He had an unbreakable cipher. Why the change?”

“I don’t know. Paranoia, maybe? He was dealing with two hostile parties, Dunbarton and Rochester, and both wanted something he had, and both of them had the Bible cipher. Maybe he wanted to hold something back, or maybe he wasn’t thinking too clearly by then.”

Oh, yes, I sympathized there. “So it’s another grille?”

“Not necessarily. I think it’s a regular book cipher. I mean it’s a running key based on a text.”

“What text? The Bible?”

“I don’t think so. Do you recall all that business in the last ciphered letter when he’s talking with Shakespeare about where to hide the play and he explains how a key works and he says something to the effect that Shakespeare said to use his own words to hide his play?”

I did, but vaguely. I said, “So we’d have to run through all of Shakespeare’s work to find it? That’ll take forever.”

“Not really. Remember that Shakespeare’s plays weren’t published in a complete edition until 1623. Bracegirdle wouldn’t have wanted to use a play that might be out in different editions, some of them corrupt. I mean he was in the business-he knew that.”

“So what then?”

“Well, fourteen rows of ciphertext. Maybe it’s a sonnet. The sonnets were published in 1609.”

“So try them.”

“Yes, boss. By the way, if this is a bust too, you’ll have to go and see Klim at my mom’s.”

“Because…?”

“Because he’s the only serious cryptographer I know. If it is a running key and not from a text we already know, then you’ll need to do a much more sophisticated analysis. Not impossible, not with the kind of computer power that he can put together, but not trivial either, maybe a keyspace of two to the fortieth or so. But I can’t do it, and he can. And you’d have my mom there too.”

“And she’s also a cryptographer?”

“No, just a real smart woman who does the Sunday Times crossword in twenty minutes or so. I’ll call her and tell her you’re coming.”

So then up to LaGuardia by plane, alerting Omar en route. He met me and was devastated when I told him about the children, real tears sprung from his eyes, the match of which the dad had not himself shed. Even my servants conspire to abash me, was my ignoble thought as we drove out on the ever-clogged Van Wyck. It was a short drive from the airport, perhaps the only advantage of a residence in Queens. At the little house I immediately saw that all was not as it should be. There was a filthy pickup truck parked in front with one wheel up on the curb, and the front door of the house hung open, although it was a chilly day. I told Omar to drive up the street a bit and to stay in our car with his cell phone at the ready while I took a look around the house. Omar objected, saying that we should both go and him armed, but I refused the offer. I didn’t say it, but it occurred to me that I had risked his life several times in this miserable affair and could not bear to risk it again, if risk there was. If risk there was, I reasoned, it were better that the lesser man should bear it, nor would I have minded the worst happening. And I rather looked forward to the opportunity of handing out some pain.

Thus I crept down the alley at the side of the house, keeping low and peering into each window in turn. In the living room, nothing. The bathroom window was obscure glass. Ahead lay the tiny backyard, two fig trees wrapped in burlap, a little patch of brown lawn, a dormant flower bed with a concrete statue of the Blessed Virgin in its center. From this yard I could see into the kitchen: and here was a tableau. Mrs. Crosetti and Klim were sitting in chairs at the table and their mouths were covered with tape. There was a large, crop-haired man in the room with them with his back to the window. He seemed to be haranguing them, and in his hand was a large nickel-plated revolver.

Without thinking I plucked the statue from the earth-it weighed perhaps fifty pounds-raised it over my head and took a little run at the house. The man must have heard something, or perhaps it was Mrs. Crosetti’s eyes widening in shock, because he turned and faced the window and so took the full force of the flying Mary (plus glass fragments) right in the kisser.

After that the familiar ritual of the police and the slow extraction of information. Mrs. Crosetti was gracious under the circumstances, although she did question my propensity for doing violence in her home, which I thought a little unfair. The man was not dead, I was happy to learn, but would certainly miss the senior prom. His name was Harlan P. Olerud, and he was a security guard from somewhere in Pennsylvania and he was under the impression that Albert Crosetti had absconded with his wife, Carolyn, and he wanted her back. Apparently he had been led to the Queens dwelling via a computer map that young Crosetti had carelessly left on the road near his home while searching for the mysterious Carolyn Rolly. The police found the map in Olerud’s pickup truck, which also held two frightened children. In the ordinary course of events, these would have been handed over to the bureaucracy that cares for parentless kids in New York, but since Mary Peg was involved, events took a different course. She wanted to take care of the tykes until we all figured out what was what with the mysterious C.R., and also I think because of an empty-nest syndrome the size of Montana. I believe I made up a little for my use of force in her home by getting dear Father Paul on the line from London. There is nothing Paul does not know about the child-care bureaucracy in New York; he made some calls, vouched for Mary Peg, made noises-unusual circumstances, police investigation, potential danger, best interests of the child, etc.-and the thing was done, at least temporarily. Board games emerged from the attic, pizza was generated out of basic ingredients, a jolly time was had by all, except that Klim beat me by fifty points at Scrabble, which I thought was a bit much, English being my first language.

Mary Peg came into the living room from putting the children to bed looking remarkably happy (here a pang at memories of Amalie in the same situation, my lost home…) and sat down next to Klim on her sofa. With all the police and kid business this was actually the first time we had been able to manage a quiet talk. I brought them up to date on what I had been doing and showed them the Bible and the Bracegirdle range finder I had purchased in Maryland. Not a word about the whole thing being a scam, of course. I also distributed printouts of the deciphered letters, and while they were reading through them I woke up Crosetti in Zurich and asked him if there were any developments. He said that Paul had told him yesterday that someone had e-mailed Amalie a picture of the kids holding that day’s copy of the New York Times. They were both smiling and seemed perfectly all right, no threatening guys in black masks. I said that seemed odd, and he agreed. “It’s like they’re on a class trip. That doesn’t sound like the Shvanov we know.”

I admitted it was peculiar, but good news at any rate. Then I told him about Harlan P. Olerud and the two children. He said he’d let Rolly know and I said I’d arrange for a call from the kids and that I’d let him know if we had any luck with the new cipher. He wanted to speak to his mother, and so I turned the phone over to her.

Klim was fooling with the range finder. “An ingenious device, quite ahead of its time. It will require a new little mirror-here-and then I believe it will work as designed. May I see the cipher from the Bible?”

I gave it to him and he examined it for a while and then said he would enter the ciphertext into Crosetti’s desktop PC and see what could be made of it. “All Shakespeare’s works are available in digital form, of course, so if the key is from his known work we should get a good hit.”

“Unless he used lines from the lost play,” said Mary Peg. “That would be a Bracegirdlian thing to do.”

“In that case,” said Klim, “we will have to use more strenuous methods.” He hefted the Bible, smiled, and walked off.

Mary Peg bid her son good-bye and said, “That’s awful about your kids. Your wife must be in agony. Shouldn’t you be over there with her?”

“I should, but she doesn’t want me. She blames me for the whole affair and she’s right. And I have a sense that the kidnapping is not what it seems.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’d rather not say just yet. But I’ve been putting some things together and I don’t think that they’re in any immediate danger. In the future, who knows, but not now, provided we can locate this thing.”

“Oh, it’s perfectly clear where it is.”

I expressed astonishment. “Yes,” she said, “they tossed it down that well he mentioned, you know the one where Bracegirdle followed Shakespeare and his goon into the forest and they saw the recusant service. That ruined priory…” She shuffled through the printouts and found the page: “Saint Bosa’s Well. Where else would it be? He says they went up to Stratford and the well is just half a day’s ride away.”

“Maybe,” I said, “but where is the well? Bracegirdle said it was a secret even in Shakespeare’s time. It could be under a factory or a housing development.”

“True. And in that case we’ll have to announce it publicly and turn the whole mess over to the authorities. Which I sometimes think we should have done from day one. But”-here an uncharacteristically wolfish expression appeared on the Map of Ireland-“I sure would like to find that play. So we can only hope that the well is still bubbling away, forgotten for centuries.”

After that she made more coffee and we drank it with Jameson whiskey in it. We talked about family, I recall, and children, and their joys and discontents. I rather regretted not liking her son and decided that it was an aspect of my craziness and resolved to be more agreeable to him in future. After some time had passed in this desultory fashion, Klim emerged with a glum look.

“I am sad to say that this ciphertext does not generate plaintext from any writing of William Shakespeare that is recorded by history. This is not deadly for us, because as I believe I have said earlier, we can run guessed probable plaintexts along the ciphertext and see if we get something intelligible and this I have started to do, but I desired to have some of your Irish coffee at this time.”

This was provided, and I asked him if he had found something intelligible yet.

“Yes, of course, we start with the commonest words in English and see if the ciphertext gives us, let us say, a the in either direction using a standard tabula recta. Of course Bracegirdle could have used a nonstandard tabula, but he has not before this, so let us suppose he is hurried and wished to stay simple. So we use the computer to query if any three letters of the ciphertext will generate a t-h-e trigram as part of our key, and you see here that we do: both TKM and WLK give us the, and when we run that key back against this ciphertext it gives us ADI and DEG, which fortunately are both trigrams common in English. Similarly running and gives us one hit and the plaintext FAD, which is also a good English trigram. Running be gives two hits, and we get ENDF for the plaintext and also a little bonus, because the first be comes right before that the we have already discovered, and so we know that be the is part of the key text. And so we go on from here. Each little advance gives us more of the plaintext and more of the key text and the two decipherings reinforce each other, which is why the running key based on a book is so weak. For this reason the KGB only used almanacs and trade reports with many tables of numbers, so the entropy is higher. Now the next word we try should be is or of, I believe…”

“No,” said Mary Peg, “try Jesus.”

“This is religious advice, my dear?”

“No, the word. You said you ran the key against the complete works and come up empty?”

“Yes. Aside from some purely random runs of pseudosense.”

“But he wrote one thing that’s not in his published works. His epitaph.”

She ran to a shelf and pulled out Schoenbaum’s Shakespeare’s Lives, and there it was on the first page:

Good friend for Jesus’ sake forbear To dig the dust enclosed here. Blessed be the man that spares these stones And cursed be he that moves my bones.

“On second thought,” she said, “it should be with the archaic spelling. I think it’s in Wood’s book.”

It was. Klim entered the old spelling into the Vigenère solver and it worked, giving us:

fromguystowrheadingeduesout

hseteightysevendegreeseachsyd

esheliethfourfadomsandfoot

belowcopyngeintheeastwall

“This seems plain enough. One stands upon a place called Guy’s Tower and sets Bracegirdle’s instrument so that the zero point in the center is pointing due south by the compass set in it. Then the arms are placed at eighty-seven degrees, and then I suppose one must have a man with a flag walk out, and one looks in the eyepiece until the two images of the flag join and there is your distance and direction. Then when you find this well, one lowers oneself down on a rope with a candle stuck to one’s head with hot grease and there at a depth of…what is a fadom?”

“A fathom,” said Mary Peg. “Six feet.”

“Yes,” said Klim, “so at a depth of let us say seven point six meters in the east wall of this supposed well we shall find your play. Or an empty hole. If we knew where this ‘Guys Towr’ was.”

“It has to be Warwick Castle,” she said confidently. “Bracegirdle wrote that you could see the castle from the ruins of St. Bosa.”

A moment on the Internet confirmed that there was indeed a Guy’s Tower on Warwick Castle, and on the south side too. I said, “That’ll be an interesting experience. Trying to sight off the top of a major tourist attraction while a man with a flag walks through the suburbs.”

But Klim’s fingers were already flying on the keys, and in a few minutes the screen showed a view from above the tower battlements of a castle. It appeared to have been taken from about twenty feet up.

“Very impressive,” I said. “This is a commercial satellite picture?”

“No, it is U.S. military. I have accessed it through an anonymous link but still we cannot stay on it very long.”

“How did you do that?” I asked.

“He’s a spy,” said Mary Peg with something like pride.

“I am a retired Polish spy, perfectly harmless. But I retain some knowledge of this sort of thing. America has the worst security of any nation, it is well known in those circles, a kind of joke in fact. Now we shall use some tools to drop a smart bomb on Mr. Shakespeare’s play.” More clicking and a red grid appeared over the picture and a palette of drawing tools sprang up along one edge of the screen. He said to Mary Peg, “My dear, if you could just measure that device?”

“Three feet exactly,” she replied after some manipulation of a tape measure.

“So…let us see, ninety-one point forty-four centimeters, which we center on the north-south diameter of this tower…so…and we then draw a line from either end at eighty-seven degrees from that base and we generate two lines which intersect…so. As you say, X marks the spot. We need not go up on the tower and bother the tourists. Thank you, United States Air Force satellite-based tactical program.” He pressed a key and the printer growled. I looked at the printout. Due south of the castle and veering off to the west was what looked like a plowed field bordered by copses of trees. The red lines from the tower converged in one of the dark little woods.

“How accurate do you think this is?” I asked Klim.

He shrugged. “As accurate as it was in 1611 at any rate. There does not seem to be a car park and lemonade kiosk there, so perhaps your well is still lost.”

I called Crosetti again and told him what I wanted him to do. It took quite a while. What a lot of cleverness and effort expended on a fraud, how many nice people would be disappointed! A perfect symbol of my life.