The Book of Air and Shadows

3

I’m back from a tour of the grounds, nothing visible from any of the windows, and I don’t really feel like wandering around out there again in that dark. It occurs to me that I am a perfect target sitting here at my laptop under a table lamp. I’m in the living room, I suppose you could call it, of this house. A lodge, really, built of actual logs in the traditional manner. There is this one large room on the first floor and three bedrooms on the upper floor, which one reaches by a stairway that leads to a kind of railed balcony above me. Then there’s a garret-type thing in the roof peak you get to via a drop ladder. The servants used to sleep there, when they had them. The walls are all pickled pine, and there are bookcases built in and a nice stereo system and a fieldstone fireplace that is literally large enough to roast an ox. A small ox. I have a fire going now, made from the good supply of oak, birch, and pine stored in the woodpile outside the kitchen door. Moose heads and racks of deer antlers decorate the base of the balcony, proof that, as Mickey has informed me, the Haas men were mighty hunters back in the day. There’s a full kitchen with stone floors and a full array of ’50s appliances on the first floor, and a couple of baths. Mickey installed a hot tub on the deck outside, although it’s drained now. I got the impression he doesn’t use the place much, although when he was a kid the family came up here every summer. It was a rich-family thing to do, apparently. I’ve been here many times before. When we were both young studs we used to bring girls for romantic weekends.

To resume the story: Professor Bulstrode handed the package over, a thick envelope bound, as I say, in tape. I asked him what was in it, and he said that it was a manuscript dating from 1642. This is the Work? I asked. No, not at all. This was merely the evidence that the Work exists, the Bracegirdle screed. But not valuable in its own right? Not as such-of purely scholarly interest, he said, and here a note of even greater nervousness entered his voice as he pressed upon me the absolute necessity of keeping the information in this package entirely confidential. That was why he was securing it in this way. I assured him that it would be perfectly safe and free from any prying eyes. He appeared to relax at this assurance; I then buzzed for Ms. Maldonado and asked her for a standard representation letter and receipt for retainer.

While this was being prepared, I attempted to engage Professor Bulstrode in casual conversation. It did not flow. He kept eyeing the taped manila envelope as if it were a bomb, and it seemed to me that he could hardly wait to put distance between him and its menace. Finally, I asked him if he’d made a copy of the document inside, and he said he had not, for reasons of security, after which he drew from me a solemn assurance that I would make none either. Here I began to lose patience and I told him that I was starting to get a little uncomfortable with this air of secrecy. The point of hiring a lawyer, I said, was that it gave you someone to speak to confidentially, and that it was obvious that he wasn’t comfortable doing that, and that this in turn made me uncomfortable representing him. In my experience, I added, people act that way with their counsel when they are trying to pull off something shady. Perhaps it would be best for all concerned if he took back his check, no hard feelings, etc.

At this he broke out into fresh floods of sweat and his face became quite flushed. He assured me that he didn’t mean to make a mystery nor, of course, was there anything in the remotest sense illegal or shady about his situation. But in academic affairs involving unique items a certain reticence was usual. He begged my pardon if he’d offended. Here Ms. Maldonado popped in and dropped the agreement on my desk. I made no move to pick up the folder. She left. I said that perhaps we’d gotten off on the wrong foot. I wanted him to trust me. He said he did. I asked him to start again: who was Bracegirdle, what was in the envelope, and what was the Work it led to?

So he told his story: He’d come across the manuscript in the course of some research into trends in Renaissance philosophy. The ms. consisted of some twenty-six folio sheets, closely written, dated 1642. Richard Bracegirdle was nobody special, a soldier who died soon after the battle of Edgehill in the English Civil War. Most of the writing was of no interest, but there were indications that Bracegirdle had been hired to move the property of a nobleman named Lord Dunbarton. Both Bracegirdle and Dunbarton were on the Parliamentary side in the war, and Dunbarton’s estate was in territory controlled, or about to be controlled, by the Royalists. He feared confiscation of his valuables and muniments and so had engaged Bracegirdle to move them, including the rarest items in the library, to his London house. What happened, however, was that the Royalist forces moved on London, blocking his path. So he buried the treasure and sent Dunbarton a letter informing him where he’d buried the swag.

Buried treasure, said I, noncommittally, and I asked him what this had to do with intellectual property. The library, he said, the library.

I asked him what was in the library, if he knew.

He didn’t answer. Instead he asked me if I knew what the Leicester Codex was. As a matter of fact I did. One of the growing edges of the IP game is the digitization of books, manuscripts, and artworks, and the assignment and negotiation of the various rights thereto pertaining. Mr. William Gates, the software billionaire, is a major player in this field, and IP lawyers tend to keep themselves apprised of his many doings. I told Bulstrode that I knew that some ten years ago Gates had purchased the Leicester Codex, one of Leonardo’s notebooks, for thirty million dollars.

At this, Bulstrode blurted out, Dunbarton had a Shakespeare manuscript. Can you imagine the value of such a thing? Now all reticence was gone, an odd little light shone in his mild eyes.

Those eyes were starting to positively bulge here, so I nodded amiably and said I supposed it would be worth a great deal, and with these words there struck the first pangs of that leaden claustral feeling I always get in the presence of a maniac. It is sadly not an unfamiliar one, for we IP lawyers are all too well-acquainted with the mad. No showbiz hit, no world-conquering diet book, no moneymaking product of the human imagination ever appears unaccompanied by a gang of shabby pretenders clutching greasy folders stuffed with documentary proof that they thought of it first. And they don’t want to hear that no one can copyright an idea, a concept. They don’t want to hear that ideas are like water or air or carbon, free for the taking, and the only thing from which loot can be wrenched by copyright is a particular set of words, or musical notes, or chemicals. I admit I had not had the Secret Document type before, but here he now was. I recall hoping that the poor bastard’s check was good.

So I waited for the florescence of the craziness: an outpouring of hectic enthusiasm about how important the lost manuscript was, what literary secrets it might reveal, its provenance, how close he was to cracking the secret code, but, somewhat to my surprise, he seemed to deflate after his revelation, and I thought that he was regretting having shared so much, and had already started to work me into his paranoia, yet another potential thief of his Precious.

We signed the forms and he left. I had Ms. M. zip downstairs and deposit the check and place the package in our safe-deposit box; and then, although I was feeling the belly rumbles of my delayed lunch, I turned to my computer and googled Andrew Bulstrode, and found a good deal more on Dr. B. than one might have expected on a simple academic. Five years ago, it appeared, Bulstrode had been a professor of English lit at Oxford, an expert on Shakespearean editions, and he had fallen prey to a man who turned out to be one of the great forgers of modern times. Leonard Hastings Pascoe was a name that even I recognized. His specialty was early printing-incunabula-and manuscripts associated with significant authors, and he was very clever indeed. He claimed to have discovered a new bad quarto of Hamlet. A bad quarto is a sort of early literary piracy, in which printers would assemble a play from the memories of actors, and whatever actual scripts they could get hold of, and print it without the permission of the author.

This was apparently a major find, for (according to the googled articles) the publishing history of Hamlet is extremely complex. There is a First Quarto (bad) and a Second Quarto (good, or authorized by the author) and the First Folio, which Shakespeare’s friends and theatrical-business partners, Heminge and Condell, had assembled after his death, which is essentially the play we now know. The supposed new bad quarto had in it many intriguing differences from the authorized play and suggested a view into Shakespeare’s writing process. It was dated 1602, right after Hamlet was registered and a year earlier than the First Quarto, raising interesting questions: were the differences mere transcription errors or did they mean that the author had changed his play after it was performed? It was the sort of thing that generates multiple orgasms among the learned. The British Museum was offered first crack by the patriotic Pascoe, and they snapped at it for the asking price, provided that the distinguished expert Andrew Bulstrode vetted it as genuine.

Which he did. Pascoe had used genuine seventeenth-century paper and ox-gall-iron ink of the correct formulation and period (derived by chemical extraction from contemporary documents, to defeat any ink-aging tests) and his type fonts had been meticulously copied from one of the bad quartos in the Folger Library. The museum bought the thing for 850,000 pounds. Bulstrode had first dibs on it, of course, and within six months had produced a magisterial work, demonstrating that in his opinion the author had heavily rewritten the great play and that in fact the Pascoe Quarto, so called, was in actuality an important link among the various proto-Hamlets that Shakespeare had used as source texts. Sensation among the dons!

And it might have become part of the critical canon had not L. H. Pascoe delighted in delicious young fellows with smoky eyes and pouting lips, and having such a taste, not promised one of these a trip to Cap d’Antibes, and a new wardrobe with it, and having so promised, not reneged, causing the young fellow, naturally enough, to drop a dime on his patron. The police raided a certain industrial estate in Ealing and found the handpress and the paper and the ink, with the fake Hamlet still set up in the forms. This occurred some eighteen months after the sale.

The money from this had apparently been mostly spent on high living of a particularly lubricious kind. The tabloids ate it whole, reserving a special venom for the peccant expert, Bulstrode. Into this mess strode my old pal Mickey Haas, who defended his colleague in the public press as having made an error that any other expert in the world would have made, including Dr. Haas himself. He arranged for Bulstrode to occupy a visiting professorship at Columbia in the hope that England might cool down after an interval. And now it seemed someone else had unloaded a document on Bulstrode, which I thought odd, since he was the last person eligible to present any important manuscript to the world, and also the last person to want to. But I had long surrendered any notion that experience was an efficient teacher. I, for example, would still be happily married had I been able to learn from my mistakes.

Or perhaps he had snapped under the strain. Professors go batty too, perhaps more often than other people, although owing to their profession their madness is less often remarked. As a reality check I looked up Lord Dunbarton and, somewhat to my surprise, found he was no figment. Henry Reith (1570-1655), second Baron Dunbarton, was a Puritan grandee. His dad, the first Lord Dunbarton, had won his spurs as one of Henry VIII’s ransacking minions, a “visitor” as they called them, kicking nuns and monks out of their cloisters and making sure that the Protestant Reformation reached every lootable ecclesiastic property in England. He was rewarded with a title and an estate in Warwickshire, Darden Hall. The son was introduced at court late in Elizabeth’s reign, won the favor of Lord Burghley, and got into what they then called the “intelligencer” business, working to catch Jesuits and expose their knavish plots against the queen’s and later King James’s peace. Under Charles I, he was a staunch Parliamentarian, having, like his father, a keen eye for the winning side, although he seemed also to be a sincere Puritan fanatic, energetically pursuing the recusants of Warwickshire. Darden Hall was occupied by Royalist troops during the brief campaign that ended at the battle of Edgehill. No mention of libraries, of Bracegirdles, of lost Shakespeariana. Now I thought that I should call Mickey Haas, to get the full story on the poor man, and I did, and was informed that Dr. Haas was at a conference in Austin and would not be back until the beginning of next week. So I went to lunch.

Here I consult my diary. Ms. Maldonado keeps my appointments, of course, and every Monday I get a sheet of paper telling me what I have for the week, but I transfer these appointments to a little leather-bound diary with blue tissue pages that I keep in the breast pocket of my shirt. I am not really what one could call absentminded, but I do get involved in the library sometimes or on the telephone, and unless I glance at this every so often I find that I miss meetings. This is how I knew it was the eleventh of October that I met Dr. B., and as I now consult it again, I learn that on the day I met Bulstrode I left work early to pick up Imogen and Nicholas at their school and take them to dinner and a movie. Wednesday evening is my official midweek appointment with my children and I also see them on alternate weekends and for two weeks in the summer.

Imogen, my daughter, is thirteen. She has straw blond hair and gray eyes and looks so like her mother that she might have been budded from the maternal stem instead of being generated by the usual method. This, by the way, seems to be a peculiarity of our family. The Mishkin genes do not work and play well with others. They either dominate totally or leave the field in a huff. Thus I look exactly like my dad, the Jewish refrigerator carton, while my brother and sister are blondie rails, recruiting posters for the Hitlerjugend. My son, Nicholas, aged eleven, is an absurd little Jake. When I was courting Amalie, my sister pointed out to me that she looked exactly like a younger version of our mom. I can’t say that I ever saw it, although the coloring and general facial type is similar. German, you could say. When Uncle Paul and Aunt Miri take Imogen out, it is universally assumed that she is their daughter, while when I am with her the average passerby gives us unfriendly looks, as if I were an abducting perve.

As for character, unlike her mother, Imogen is a perfect Narcissus; all others exist but to worship her and if not, watch out! She is an athlete-a swimmer of some talent-and wants to be an actress, an ambition I support, for I consider her unsuited for any other life. I believe she gets this tendency from me. When I was in high school in Brooklyn, a teacher told me that I had a good voice and that I should go out for drama, and I did and got the part of Telegin in Uncle Vanya, a small role, but like all Chekhov roles it can be made memorable. I suppose that they no longer do Chekhov in Brooklyn public high schools, but then they did, along with many other cultural activities that are no longer possible in this current age of brass. Telegin is called Waffles in the play because his face is pocked, and mine at sixteen was a mess too. My big line was “I have forfeited my happiness but I have kept my pride.” Naturally, I fell in love with Gloria Gottleib, who played Sonia and who didn’t know I was alive, etc., but the interesting thing was that even after I was offstage and even after we’d done our three performances in the orange-juice-smelling auditorium, I still felt inhabited by Telegin, and this was wonderful to me, that a made-up person created by a man long dead could in a sense displace my own personality.

I should mention here that until I appeared in this thing I had been a miserable figure, too obscure even to be a butt of mockery. It is relatively easy to disappear in a large urban high school, but I had special reasons for becoming one with the tan tiles of the wall. I was a Catholic kid with a Jewish name and a Nazi grandfather in a school where the aristocracy was intellectual and almost entirely Jewish, plus Izzy the Book, was not unknown to the tabloids at the time as oft indicted, never convicted. I lived in terror of someone (i.e., Gloria Gottleib) making the connection. On top of this, my brother Paul, two years older, was a thug. He announced this, as thugs did then, with the black leather jacket and the collar up in back and the duck’s ass hairdo. Being a nonentity was preferable to being famous as Paulie Mishkin’s brother. At some level I knew that I was protected by his ferocious aura from the light bullying that would’ve been my fate otherwise. Paul insisted that when I got pounded, which was fairly often, the pounder would be him only. The worst fight I ever saw when I was growing up was Paul taking out two guys from a well-known street-fighting gang who had mugged my lunch money on the way to school. He used a brick.

These obsessive images. That’s not what I want to write down at all, although perhaps it’s significant that after this fight, and Paul’s suspension from school as a result, was when I started serious lifting. I resolved not to have to depend on him to stick up for me, and further, I supposed that if I became a moose I could avoid fights. Little did I know.

In any case, after Uncle Vanya I made a terrific ass of myself by more or less staying in character perpetually, wearing an antique brocade vest I found in a junk shop, speaking with a slight accent, pretending to have to reach for an English word, mumbling in what I imagined sounded like Russian. I became somewhat more popular, as amusing lunatics sometimes do, and I began to get invitations to high-end parties thrown by the popular Jewish girls. The next play we did was Romeo and Juliet and I was Mercutio. The fit with him was much better than with Telegin, for to fill the harmless air with witty nonsense, strike antic poses, and absurdly die seems glorious to the young; nor is it o’er taxing to speak, like this, in rich and flowing iambs, till all about you wish you dead. For the teenaged boy playing Mercutio the hard part is to speak the dirty stuff without cracking up, all that business about pricks in act I, scene iv, for example, may be even harder than doing a convincing job as Romeo. As for Juliet…you know, speaking as an IP lawyer, I would say that Shakespeare’s famous powers of invention do not show well in the matter of plots. All but two of the plays are ripped off, sometimes blatantly, from prior sources; and it was a good thing for him they didn’t have copyright in those days. We go to hear his plays for the language, just as we go to opera for the music; plot is secondary in both, trivial really, but-and contemporaries picked this up as well-there is no one like him for seizing something out of life and putting it on the stage. Such a coup is the end of act II, scene ii. This is the famous balcony scene, and I don’t mean the front part that everyone quotes but the depiction of a love-mad child at the end. An adult playing it-Claire Bloom perhaps-can’t help but seem absurd, but a sixteen-year-old can make it live, especially if one is in love with the girl, as I was, and I recall very distinctly the moment when, as I watched the divine Miss Gottleib draw out the long goodbye, I thought to myself this is the life for me, this is my destiny, to open my being to genius, to be possessed, to be free of my miserable self.

This was my junior year in high school, a year that marked the beginning of the long twilight of the mob in New York. In that era, before the code of silence collapsed with Mr. Valachi, the best way to put a big-shot Italian away was to get him for tax violations, and my dad was therefore right in the crosshairs. As usual, they had him on numerous charges and were putting on the pressure to make him testify against his employers. Had they taken time to consult his family they would not have thus confused him with someone lacking moxie. All during the fall of that year, while we rehearsed R &J, Dad was on trial in federal court for the southern district of New York. While we had never been what you could call a happy household, this period was especially grim.

Let me here touch briefly upon the family drama. Izzy and Ermentrude continued as they had begun, at gunpoint (at least metaphorically), although I believe they believed they were in love, this defined as the continued attempt to bend the beloved to one’s own will. Here is the tableau that sticks in my mind. It is evening. We boys are prepubescent, perhaps I am eight, Paul is ten, the girl is six. We have dutifully done our homework and had it inspected by Obersturmbannführer-Mutti. The air is redolent with heavy Teutonic cookery. This is still the time of alles in ordnung, before the discovery of That Whore, his mistress, after which our mom more or less gave up on life for a while. We are perhaps watching a small-screen colorless television, perhaps arguing over which channel to watch. Growing tension as six o’clock comes and goes. Will he appear? Will he be in a good mood or not? Six-thirty, and Mutti is banging pots and slamming drawers, and muttering in German. We listen for the clink of bottle on glass. Seven o’clock. A smell of burning, of expensive proteins going dry, of vegetables steaming into inedible slush. We are ravenous, but none dares to enter the kitchen.

Seven-fifteen and the door opens. Our hearts sink when we see his face. No little gifties for the kids tonight, no hearty hi-ho Silvers for the boys, no snatchings up of the little girl and whirlings-around. No, tonight we go straight to the table, and the ruined dinner is flung thumping and clattering on the board, and my father says I’m not gonna eat this shit, and then they get into it, back and forth, in English and then demotic German, in which, even if we can’t follow the exact meaning, the violence is perfectly apparent, and then the platters and cutlery start flying, and Miriam ducks under the table and I follow, holding her little weeping head to my chest. Paul stays upright in his chair, and I can see him from my position below, face white, white too the knuckles of the fist that clutches his table knife. The fight grows in volume, ending usually with “fucking Nazi” from him and “Jew pig” from her and then he slugs her one and leaves. Slam! And we come out again and she makes us sit up straight and finish every scrap of the inedible food while she tells us about how it was to actually starve in poor Germany, after zeh war, and zo we must finish everyting. This isn’t why we choke it down, though; it’s because what else can we do for her?

But during the trial we didn’t do that anymore; now silence reigned. Mutti slapped warmed-up canned goods on the table and retreated into her bedroom, from which the sounds of the German classics emerged, Beethoven, Bruckner, Wagner. She started drinking more, and when she got her load on, the volume went up. Dad might kick the door down then and smash records, or he might just leave and not return for days. Paul also was rarely home. After graduating (barely) from high school he had taken to hanging out with his gang, who had also graduated (as we were shortly to learn) from petty theft to armed robbery.

That left me to cope with the household and with my sister, Miriam, then fourteen. Miri had already developed the remarkable face she would carry into adulthood, a face whose angled planes acted like those on a stealth bomber to allow undetectable penetration deep into the heart of enemy territory, in this case, the male sex. I made no attempt to actually control her, knowing it would be futile, but I could at least ensure that she had meals and clean garments, and between me and Paulie we were successful (I believe) in discouraging the attentions of guys over thirty. One morning, just before Thanksgiving of that year, Dad did not show up in court, nor did he return home. Naturally we feared the worst, that his mob pals had lost faith in his silence (since it was fairly clear by then that he was going to go down for the top counts of the indictment unless he did a deal) and had acted to forestall this. I recall thinking of him stuffed into a weighted oil drum or resting under the asphalt of a highway and trying to feel sad, and failing.

But he hadn’t been whacked. After a period of some weeks, the papers reported that he’d been sighted in Tel Aviv. He had skipped bail and followed his mentor, Meyer Lansky, into comfortable exile. Not a card for us, not a call. Later I heard he’d changed his name to something more Hebraic, as encouraged by the Israeli government, although I suppose there are Mishkins enough in that nation. This was all before media frenzy became the rule, and so we only had a couple of reporters come by our house, and Paulie and some of his friends beat the shit out of them, smashing cameras, etc. This was when you could beat the shit out of the press without having it captured on videotape, which made for a more civilized press, in my opinion. Since Dad had put our house and his immovable assets up to make his colossal bail, and he’d skipped with all the cash on hand, we were left essentially destitute. After a decent interval the bailiffs came and took Dad’s Caddy and served us with eviction papers.

At this point we had a small miracle. I awoke one Saturday morning to the sound of strenuous packing and Parsifal on the stereo. Mutti was back, in charge, shouting orders. We kids were marshaled into action, as well as two guys I’d never seen before, German speakers, probably war criminals in hiding that Mutti had dug up somewhere. It was Regensburg 1945 again, Hitler was gone, the Reds were coming, and life had to be whipped into shape from the ruins. I understand that Ukrainian villages cheered the arrival of the Nazis in 1941, and we kids were in somewhat the same state-anything had to be better than what we’d recently experienced, and maternal fascism was at least a known quantity. The Germans had a truck too, and it moved us from our comfortable brick house in Flatbush to a cramped two-bedroom in a high-rise public project out by the Queens borderline.

So our lives continued without Dad. The salary from the job Mutti obtained as a clerk at King’s County Hospital was just enough to keep us in underwear and bratwurst. We kids thereafter devoted ourselves to living the lives we thought would most piss Dad off: Paul became a stupid rather than a clever criminal; I became a star student (i.e., a schmuck); and Miri, not to mince words, became a slut. In short order, Paul got nailed for a liquor store holdup and went off for his jolt upstate, Miri ran off with a playboy, and I graduated with honors, aced my SATs, and went to Columbia, where I met Mickey Haas. I hope this connects all the dots.

But I started this long digression by describing my children, and I see I have not yet said anything about my son, Nicholas-Niko, as we call him. For a long time we thought, or rather I thought, that there was something wrong with Niko, some form of autism perhaps, or one of the other childhood syndromes lately invented to provide the drug companies with fresh markets. He failed to walk or talk at the usual times, and I insisted on taking him to various specialists, although his mother maintained that there was nothing seriously wrong with him. In time, his mother was proven correct. He began to talk at around four, and from the start in perfect paragraphs, and demonstrated at around the same time that he had taught himself to read. He is some kind of prodigy, but we’re not really sure what kind. I admit now that I have never felt entirely comfortable in his presence. To my shame. When he was six, before our home dissolved, he used to come into the little room that I used as a study or den and stand staring at me and would say nothing at all when I asked him what he wanted. Eventually, I used to ignore his presence, or try to. I imagined sometimes that he could see into me, into my deepest thoughts and desires, and that he, alone of my family, knew then how perfectly rotten I was.

He goes to Copley Academy with Imogen and has special tutoring in mathematics and computer science, at both of which he excels. Izzy the Book thus struck, in a fashion, across the generations, skipping me, for I never received more than a B- in the few math courses my education required. Niko is a solid, grave little man, and in his features he has already started to resemble his paternal grandfather, the dark, canny, opaque eyes, the schnoz, the wide mouth, the thick curling dark hair. As far as I know, he has never learned anything from me. The last time I tried it was at the pool, when I attempted to teach him to swim. Not only did I fail, but my efforts sent him into a hysteria so profound and long lasting that no one has ever tried to teach him again, and he remains a terrified sinker. On land I suppose he is reasonably happy; Copley is the kind of place where, if you are not disruptive, they leave you alone. They don’t give out grades, and they charge twenty-eight-five a year. I don’t begrudge this in the least, as I make a good living. I bill on average seven-fifty an hour, and my annual billings are usually well in excess of two thousand hours per annum. You may do the math. I have no expensive hobbies (or only one, I should say), I dislike travel, and I have moderate tastes. I bought a loft in Tribeca before the prices went nuts, and Amalie also leads a fairly simple life and has a substantial income of her own, although given free rein she would surrender our entire substance to the poor and suffering and live with the children under an elevated highway instead of in a nice brownstone on East Seventy-Sixth Street.

I love my children as much as I love anything, which I have to say is not all that much. I am able to maintain the simulacrum of a good father simply as an act of imagination, as previously I maintained that of a good son, a good brother, a friend, and so on. It is more easy than you might think to fool people, and until I met Amalie I thought everyone was like that, I thought people picked a script from a cultural box and played it out, I thought that, really, there was no difference between Jake Mishkin playing Mercutio and Jake Mishkin playing Jake Mishkin, except that Mercutio was better written.

That was, by the way, why I didn’t go into acting professionally. I told myself that I gave up the theater (and what a gross self-pitying phrase that sounds!) because I required a sure source of income to support my family, but in fact it was because once I got into a part it was nearly impossible for me to get out of it. What was funny-eccentric in high school became funny-peculiar when I got a little older, and then not funny at all. I imagined myself spending my days in a locked ward, stuck in Macbeth or Torvald Helmer. Or Estragon. And there was also, I don’t know, something seriously toxic about the people who were involved with theater, or maybe I just projected that because I was scared. So I switched to prelaw and have had little reason to regret it since. I don’t go to plays.

I’ve returned after a break to drink some coffee and have a doughnut. I bought two dozen at a place in Saranac Lake and have been living off them and coffee for some time. The house is well stocked with canned goods and staples, some of them of considerable age, and there is a freezer with fish and game in it. Mickey said I could stay here indefinitely, although he added that in the event of a nuclear attack I would have to share it with him and whichever of his three wives he decides to bring along. There is a town twenty-six miles off, New Weimar, but I have not visited it. I thought it best if no one local knew I was here. The house is quite isolated, standing at the end of a long dirt driveway that comes off a gravel road, that diverges from a secondary state road that comes off Route 30 west of Saranac Lake. The isolation is purely physical, however, for some years ago Mickey installed a satellite dish, and so you can get the usual two hundred channels, and more significantly there is broadband Internet access via the dish. I like to feel that with a few button pushes I can send this out to the whole world. This may be a bargaining chip at some point, with whom I don’t yet know.

Reading this over I see I have screwed up the line of the narrative beyond all repair. It might have been better had I simply set out to write out my life story straight up, as if, like Bracegirdle, I were on my deathbed, instead of merely dwelling in the probability of meeting some violent end in the not-too-distant future. Death, I suppose, concentrates the mind, assuming one has a mind left. The problem is that I started out to tell a simple story like you used to find in cheap thrillers, the electronic equivalent of the last-gasp message, the cryptic scrawl on the plaster, the note in blood-“the emeralds are in the p [illegible scrawl]”; or “It wasn’t Har.” And from this arises the plot. But it seems that my life has become mixed up with the story, as was Bracegirdle’s, viz.:

Though God did not call mee to stande among the greate still I am a man not a clod & my story bears telling if onlie to holpe in the breding of my sonne: who needs muste rise to manhoode lacking what ever poore model I might have supply’d.

So saith Bracegirdle and so say I.

To take up the tale then, I see by my diary that the next two days passed without significant incident, as did the weekend, blank except for a lone “Ingrid,” which meant I must have gone up to Tarrytown for dinner drinks a brace of reasonably satisfying acts of sexual intercourse breakfast and bye-bye Ingrid.

No, this slights a very nice woman, a choreographer, whom I met at a music company gala, and whom I caused to fall for me by being courteous, sympathetic, generous, and large. She is not the first, was not the last, to make this misstep. I don’t know what’s wrong with men nowadays, but the isle of Manhattan seems to be full of attractive, classy, sexy women between thirty and fifty years of age, both married and single, who find it nearly impossible to get laid. I do my best, but it is a sad business. Let me not enter into all that now.

On the Monday, we had our usual partners’ meeting in the morning and afterward, as I usually do, I called my driver and went to the gym. I noted above that I live a fairly simple life, no expensive hobbies, etc., but I suppose that having a driver perpetually on call might be counted an extravagance. With the car, it costs me a little shy of fifty grand a year, but on the other hand much of it is deductible as a business expense. There is no good rapid transit connection between my home and my office, and I do not fit into a regular cab, or so I tell myself. The car is a Lincoln Town Car, in midnight blue to distinguish it from all the black ones. My driver, who has been with me for nearly six years, is called Omar. He is a Palestinian and, like me, a heavy-class weight lifter. He was driving a cab when we met, and we both complained about how the regulation cabs they had in New York were not designed for men like us, either as passengers or drivers, and from that came my decision to get the Lincoln and have Omar drive it. He is a terrific driver, both safe and speedy, doesn’t drink, and keeps the car spotless. His only fault (if you can call it one) is that when it is time for prayer, he feels obliged to pull over, get his rug out of the trunk, and kneel down on the sidewalk. This has not happened more than a few times with me aboard, however.

I am not devout myself, although I am not an atheist either. Nor an agnostic, a position I consider absurd, and excessively timorous. I suppose I am a Catholic still, although I do not practice the faith. Like the demons in hell, I believe and tremble. If people ask, I say this is because certain positions of the hierarchy or the Vatican are repugnant to me, as if the church were not quite good enough to contain the glory that is Jake Mishkin, but this is not true. I abandoned worship so that I could be a devil among the women. Yes, my single expensive hobby.

Back to Monday…I was in the gym, which is at Fifty-first off Eighth Avenue. Part of the gym is a regular carpeted Nautilus operation for the locals, but the weight room is unusually well appointed. This is because the proprietor, Arcady V. Demichevski, formerly lifted heavy for the old Soviet Union. Arcady will give you weight-lifting advice if you ask him, and he has a Russian-style steam room with a masseur on site. This end of the gym smells of wintergreen, sweat, and steam. Arcady says the great lifters lift with their heads more than their bodies, and this I have found to be true. It should be impossible for a human being, however muscled, to heave a quarter ton of deadweight into the air, but it is regularly done. As noted already, I have done it myself. It is all about concentration and, who knows, some strange form of telekinesis. It is marvelously relaxing for me to spend an hour or so in the middle of the day lifting weights. When I am done lifting, and have had a steam, I can barely remember that I am a lawyer.

In any case, I had just finished a set of three-hundred-pound bench presses with Omar spotting me. As I was filling my water bottle at the fountain on the Nautilus side, I spied two men entering the gym. They spoke to Evgenia, Arcady’s daughter, at the front desk and I saw her point me out. They came over to me, showed their badges, and introduced themselves as police detectives: Michael Murray and Larry Fernandez. We are so prepped by the cop shows to be interviewed by the police, we have all seen it a zillion times, that when it happens in real life it is oddly anticlimactic. The actual cops looked like the guys who just missed getting the TV part: an ordinary medium-size Jewish-type New York guy and a ditto Hispanic. Murray was somewhat more overweight than they like to show on TV, and Fernandez had misshapen teeth. It was somewhat hard to keep a straight face as they asked me if I knew Andrew Bulstrode, because I imagined what we were doing playing out on the small screen, and I sensed also that they did as well, that they had even learned how to behave from watching N.Y.P.D. Blue and Law & Order.

I answered that he was a client of mine, and they asked me when I saw him last, and I said the first time was the last time, and then they asked if I knew why anyone would have wanted to harm him. I said no, but also that I didn’t know him all that well, and I asked them why they’d come to see me. They said they had found a binder agreement in his room in a residence hotel on upper Broadway that Columbia keeps for visiting faculty, at which point I asked them had anyone harmed him? They said that someone had visited him in that room on Sunday night, tied him to a chair, and, apparently, tortured him to death. They asked me what I was doing Sunday night, and I told them about Ingrid.

Tortured to death. They didn’t supply any details and I did not pry. I recall being shocked but, and this was strange too, not surprised. I neglected to tell the police about the package he had given me, for I considered that it was none of their business, not, at least, until I had taken the time to examine it myself.

THE BRACEGIRDLE LETTER (3)

So we began & I found I had a head for this worke-the numbers stuck hard as Latine never did. I learnt me what is twice two, twice three &c until sixteen sixteens & he expounded & I did fix it in my mynde how to figure therebye using but a pensille & paper: & also Division, as if a man wished to packe 2300 jarres twelve to a boxe how many boxes to be builded & what left in the last one alle figured with no board. He gave me besides a booke which was a wonder to me named DISME: or the Art of Tenths by a Dutchman Simon Stevins, & although you will be hard put to understand Nan I will any way tell you that Disme is a kind of Arithmeticke consisting in Characters of Cyphers; whereby a certain number is described & by which also all accounts which happen to humane affayres, are dispatched by whole numbers, without fractions or broken numbers. When I had shewed I was master of that he let me looke into his Euclid lately englished by Billingsley Lord Mayor of London. Which I ate as foode to a stervyng man or lyke one bounde in fetters, of a sodden set free. Beside this he instructed me in the art of the quadrante & other philosophickal devises that were I thinke ne’er seen on Fish Street before & taught me to make plats to scale from measoures wee took with quadrante & chaynes: also the elements of astronomick figuringe such as takynge Latitudes from the sun & divers stars: mee that when I began I sweare I knew not a Latitude from a cheese. So it was a greate thinge for me to accomplish this who had been accounted a slugg at schole.

This all in one sommer my twelft year: but now my father seeyng this taxed us sayyng what shal you not only be idle thyselfe but also tayke my clerke into idlenesse with thee? But Mr Wenke stod his grownde lyke a man quoth he sir this lad you have is as apt at the Mathematicks as any I have seen: in some few moneths he has learned near all I have to teach hym & will shortly exceede me. He, that is my father, saith how will this Mathematicks sell me more iron? Mr Wenke then says what I have taught the boye will grately spede the workynges of accountes, and to me saith, do you shew your father your Arithmeticke.

So I took pensille & a bit of paper from the fire-box & wishing to mayke a vainglorious shew I Multiplied two numbers of seven figures together. My fathere looked & he saith pah that is mere scribbling. Nay sir, Mr Wenke sayde he has it right. My fathere sayde how can you say so? For it would take an houre or more to mayke certayne that figure working with my borde. So we were at a stand; also my fathere had it in his heade besides that there were some thing papistical about such workynges as cominge mayhap from Italie or other landes under sway of the harlot Rome.

Nexte day he ruled I should studie no more with Mr Wenke & be made a foundry-man insteade, saying we shall see if you founder in this as well & laughed heartie at his witte. Soe amid many teares of my deare mother & I too wept most bitter, I wase sent off to my Bracegirdle cozens at Titchfield. The night I left Mr Wenke sought me privily & pressed on me the first ten bookes of his Euclid, saying I have them by heart in the maine & can buy more at Pauls if needbe & make thou good use of them. Soe I departed my home.

My cozzens workes at Titchfield were as unlyke the countynge-house in Fish Streete as one could well imagine for makeing iron is as different from sellyng it as slaughteryng oxen be from the sarving of a mete pye: by that I intend dirty hard callous brute work. My cozzen Matthew the maistre of the place was harde as the stoffe he mayde. Looking down at me for he was a tall grete beare of a man he sayde what a paltrie thinge thou art but we will toughen you or kill you before a yeare be out we shall see which it shalbe & laughed. But though I worked lyke a slave & slept hard on straw with the other prentyces this was not the hardest of my newe lot for I had been blessed by nice breding never a curse in my house & all orderly nor had I ever been much among sinners in the way of the flesh. But now I thought I was amongst vere devils. My maistre though he professed the true faith was a vile hypocrite verey sober in church of Sundays but otherwise a roisterynge knave he kept a punke in the towne & dranke & beat his wyfe & servantes when in cups & fed we prentices short commons in oure kennel. The prentices themselves I swear were become little more than beastes of the field fighting & stealing & drunk when they could filtch ale. They were upon me from the start like crowes at a carcasse on account of my manneres & that I was a relatioun of the maistre & mayde my lyfe a miserie, which I bore as I must, weepeing onlie in secrete & prayynge for release whether by deathe or some othere mercie I cared not. But now one of them Jack Carey by name a lowde booreish fellow spied me at my Euclide & ripped it from my hande & mocked me for a mere clerke & made to throw it in the fyre, then I lept up lyke a fiende, & tooke up a stave & stroke him upon his heade so that he dropped the booke & fell senselesse down & three of them muste holt me then or I would have done grete evil upon hym even murther I think for being overcome with my rage, for which may God forgyve me. But afterwards my waye was more easie amongst them.