The Book of Air and Shadows

7

Yes, ridiculous. Did I give the impression that I am a famous lecher about town? Not true. I seem to keep falling in love, which is not the same thing. Yes, Dr. Freud, I am compensating for withdrawal of maternal affection, and yes, Dr. Jung, I am unable to make peace with my negative anima, and yes, Father, I have sinned through my own fault, in what I have done and what I have failed to do. Yet it is not, I must insist, merely sex. I have never had a better sexual relationship than the one I had with Amalie, but clearly, it was not enough. From very early in our marriage I was in the habit of having one on the side, and as I believe I’ve already noted, there is no shortage of such opportunities in New York City.

Ingrid, my current girlfriend, is a good example, and the clever and impatient reader may be thinking, Oh, he’s avoiding getting to Miranda, he’s stalling. This is true, and tough shit. I may die, but I am not actively dying like poor Bracegirdle; perhaps I have all the time in the world.

Ingrid was happily married for nearly twelve years to Guy, a successful television executive, and by all accounts a prince among men, and especially princely compared to many others in that business, but one day in his fifty-second year he got out of bed, walked into the bathroom and began to shave, whereupon something popped in his brain and he died right there. No symptoms, perfectly healthy, good blood pressure, low cholesterol, but dead. Ingrid spent the next three years in the most intense mourning, after which her naturally sunny disposition burst through again, and she decided to get on with life. She had not gone out at all during those three years but now accepted an invitation to one of those anonymous award or fund-raising galas that enable the rich to mingle with the creative and thereby draw some of the divine afflatus into their desiccated lives. She went to a spa and got done, had her hair cut at the salon of the moment, bought a new outfit and made her appearance.

She has such a nice appearance: just forty, quite tall, perhaps too fleshy to dance at the highest levels, which is why she switched early to choreography. Her hair is boy-short and light brown, very fluffy, and she has those long wolf eyes in gray. Terrific wide mouth too with a little overbite, which I find quite attractive. And the dancer’s body. I was at the party too, being myself a rich person needing a whiff of the real stuff, and as soon as I saw her, I grabbed the arm of my law partner Shelly Grossbart, who knows everyone in the music business, and asked him who she was. He had to think for a moment before he said, “Christ, that looks like Ingrid Kennedy. I thought she was dead.” He made the introductions. We chatted about dance and intellectual property and actually had a fascinating conversation about the extent to which dance was protected by the laws of copyright. I found her intelligent and amusing; I suppose she found me likewise.

Later in the evening, the two of us having consumed what I suppose was the better part of two bottles of Krug, she caught me up with those long gray peepers and inquired whether she could ask a personal question. I said she could and she said, “Do you like to fuck women?”

I said that, given an appropriate other, I rather did.

“Well,” she said, “I actually haven’t had any sex since my husband died three years ago and you seem like a nice man and lately I’ve been having these incredibly horny feelings and just masturbating doesn’t seem to work.”

I replied that it didn’t for me either.

And she said, “So if you don’t have any STDs…?” I assured her in the negative, and she continued, “I live in Tarrytown and I always take a room when I come to these things so I don’t have to drive home drunk, but tonight I was hoping to meet a halfway decent man whom I could take upstairs to it.”

Yes she was drunk, but not off-puttingly so. We slipped out of the ballroom without further discussion and took the elevator. She was, and is, a laugher, in my experience the rarest orgasmic sound. Not yucks, as at the Three Stooges, but a rippling glissando somewhere between what you produce when you smack your funny bone and the joyous hysteria of tickled little girls. It takes some getting used to but is truly delightful, like you’re with a real friend and not engaged in yet another grim skirmish of the war between the sexes.

So it began. Ingrid and I have little in common. We mostly talk about our former spouses, these sessions occasionally ending in tears. I used to have several Ingrids at one time, but no longer. I believe this is not through any sudden impulse of fidelity but simple exhaustion. Some men I know (and I believe Mickey Haas is one of them) delight in the maintenance of a network of deceptions, playing one woman off against another, provoking operatic scenes, and so on, but not me. I am not even a decent rake. It’s simply that I have no power of resistance, and while it is conventional to suppose that it is the man who does the pursuing and wooing, I have not found this to be so. The little story above about me and Ingrid is not at all unique, not even that unusual. They look at you, they make remarks, they hold their bodies in a certain way, and perhaps there are secret pheromones too; the availability is in any case announced and one says, Oh, why not? Or I do, at any rate.

The only real campaign of seduction I have ever carried out was directed against my wife, Amalie, née Pfannenstieler, and I will have to tell about this too before continuing with the story of Miranda.

(Pretend that time is suspended for now, Miranda and I are still in the paneled room at the library, our hands touching, the electricity flowing like Boulder Dam, pheromones beading up on all slick surfaces…)

So-my first job out of law school laboring as an associate at Sobel Tennis Carrey, on Beaver Street in the financial district. The firm had a modest practice in trademark and copyright, but anyone could see then-some twenty years ago that was-that intellectual property was going to be big, and I was working like mad in the usual manner of young associates. This was during the high tide of the sexual revolution, the first time in recent history when any reasonably well-set-up young fellow could have sex ad lib with females other than whores or courtesans, and in pursuit of this delicious horror I repaired nearly every night to one of several saloons (meat markets, they were amusingly called) in the East Village and uptown to continue and extend my revenge on the girls.

One Saturday morning, hungover and having detached myself from my meat market conquest of the previous evening, I went down to my office to complete some work I had scanted so as to get a good start on my Friday-night hijinks. I was in the firm’s library, quite alone in the office, when I heard a distant tapping, which I soon determined was coming from the office’s locked outer door. Investigating this, I found a young woman standing in the deserted hallway. I recognized her as someone who worked at Barron & Schmidt, a financial outfit with whom we shared the fourteenth floor. We had often risen on the elevator together, me dull with the night’s excess, she quiet and neatly turned out but carrying that look on her features that parries the male glance nearly as well as a Pathan burka.

She introduced herself and told me she had locked herself out of her office. I could see she was wretchedly embarrassed by it, especially as it was a trip to the john that had occasioned the flub. Charming little blossoms of red had appeared on her cheeks as a result of conveying this tale. She had fine, white-blond hair gathered in little twisty braids wound around her ears, rather a Pippi Longstocking effect, and she was wearing white jeans and a black Kraftwerke T-shirt, the black-letter text nicely distorted by her pretty pointy breasts, a Saturday outfit quite unlike the proper and cryptomammary suits she always wore to work. Her eyes were preternaturally large, just short of goggly, her mouth a little pink bud. She looked about seventeen but was (as I found later) nearly twenty-six. She was about five inches shorter than I was, tall for a woman, and had an athletic body (winter sports as I also learned-she was Swiss), slim of waist, with legs to the chin.

I invited her in and she made her call to building maintenance and they said they’d send a man around, but it’d be a while. She was truly stranded, since her bag with all her money and ID was locked up in Mr. Schmidt’s office. She was his private secretary and was learning the international finance business. Did she like international finance? No, she thought it was silly. She could not get excited about money. One needed enough, it was horrid to be poor, but beyond that there was something not healthy about wanting ever more and more and more. It was sometimes almost wicked, she said, and cutely wrinkled her nose. She asked me what I did at the firm and I told her and added that I thought I would never make a good IP lawyer because I felt most of the cases were sort of dumb and weren’t really about the true purpose of IP law, which was to make sure that the creative act was rewarded, with the better part of the money going to the actual creator. Unfortunately this was, I informed her, hardly the rule; rather the opposite was in fact the case. Well, said she, you must fix that.

And she said it with such confidence-first, assuming such a fix was possible, and second, assuming I was the man for the task-that I was amazed. Perhaps I gaped. She smiled: light filled the dreary room and the dreary place in my head. I felt an unfamiliar shock. To recover, I asked her if she was ever really wicked herself. She said she tried to be, because everyone said it was such fun, but it was not fun at all, more sick-making than anything else, and she hated to be poked by men she didn’t know.

Poked? I questioned the word. A little idiomatic slip; she meant pawed. In any case, this is what had drawn her from stuffy old Zurich to naughty New York. Her family was devoutly Catholic and so was she, she supposed, but she craved a little more zing in her life. Is that right? Zing?

It was, I assured her. And I informed her that today was her lucky day, because I was certainly among the wickedest men in New York and I would be pleased to take her among the depraved in their fleshpots, to provide zing but no poking. Unless she desired it, which was, of course, my wicked plan, but I did not voice this then. Her eyes lit up and again that smile. Waves of goodness broke upon my bitter brow.

Thus began my first date with Amalie. The building manager took his time getting up to the office, for which I blessed him in my heart, and we spent the interval talking about the one thing we found that (remarkable!) we had in common, which was that we were both Olympians. She had competed for Switzerland (alpine skiing) at Sapporo. And about our families, or rather about her family, which was like something out of Heidi. (Later, when she got her bag back she showed me pictures of colorfully parkaed upper-middle-class Switzers on the slopes, in front of the chalet, eating fondue. No, a lie, none eating fondue, but they did eat fondue, and I ate a lot of it too during our marriage.) I had not realized that there were Catholic Swiss, since I associated the tiny mountain republic with grim old Calvin, but of course there are the pope’s Swiss Guards, who are really Swiss, and Amalie’s mother’s brother was one of them. Very hoch were the Pfannenstielers. And what of your family, Jake?

Oh, what indeed? Mother dead by then, Dad “traveling,” brother studying in Europe (I boasted a bit here), sister…I thought of lying, but I never can keep my lies straight (I mean in personal life; as a lawyer I am, of course, a perfectly competent fabricator), so I said my sister was Miri de Lavieu. At that time in New York you would have had to be more or less blind to not know who she was, that, or perfectly out of tune with popular culture. “The model,” I added to her blank look. I asked her if she had ever heard of Cheryl Tiegs, Lauren Hutton, or Janice Dickinson. She asked me if these were also my sisters? I have never met anyone, before or since, as uninterested in celebrity. Not of this world entirely, was Amalie. I should have taken warning from this, but I did not.

Now came the guy from the building and opened her office, and after she had done some final bits of work we left. I had at that time a BMW R70 motorcycle, upon which I commuted to work in nearly all weathers. She mounted the pillion, I spun up the machine. She placed her hands lightly around my waist.

Is there anything better than riding on a powerful motorcycle with a girl clutching on behind, her thighs pressing against your hips, her breasts making two warm ovals against your back, which pressure you can subtly augment whenever you like by tapping a little harder on the brakes than traffic conditions require? If so I have never found it. I took her up to Union Square, where in that season there was an immense billboard covering the entire side of a building showing an ad for a liquor that featured a blond woman in a slinky black evening gown. I stopped and pointed. That’s my sister, I said. Amalie laughed and pointed to another billboard, this one showing a bare-chested young fellow in jeans. My brother, she said, and laughed again. I drove on, a little deflated, but in a nice way. I had scored plenty by being my sister’s brother, so lustful are many in the city for even indirect contact with celebrities, and I was a little thrilled by the strangeness of being with someone to whom it meant nothing at all.

I bought her a meal in a Caribbean restaurant frequented by big-time guapos and their molls, noisy with salsa music, and vibrational with contained violence, and then we toured various dives and music clubs, the kind with drug markets in the john and blow jobs available in the alley behind. I was not famous enough to get into some of them, but Miri’s name and the fact that I knew a number of the bouncers from my weight-lifting avocation served to breach the velvet ropes, that and the remarkable-looking woman on my arm. She turned out to be a terrific dancer; I was not bad at the time, but she danced me into the floor. People stared at her with peculiar looks on their faces that I couldn’t quite interpret-contempt, longing? The damned contemplating the saved, perhaps; I’m sure the same look was on my face half the time.

Long story short: I took her back to her place, a condo sublet on First off Seventy-eighth, and to my immense surprise and dismay, I got a crisp Swiss handshake and a chaste cheek kiss. Same on the second date, same on the third. After that a little light canoodling, but she would not, as we used to say, put out. She said there’d been a boy at school and she’d slept with him and he’d broken her heart and she’d realized then that she was not made like the other girls she knew, not like they showed in the films, she couldn’t bear sex without commitment, she didn’t agree with everything the church said, but she thought it was right on that score, and had been perfectly celibate since. Waiting for Mr. Right? I asked her, and she, ignoring my irony, said yes. This colloquy took place, by the way, in the middle of an infamous club that was practically a petri dish for sexually transmitted diseases.

At this time in my life, I should add, I was entertaining at least four women, all lovely, all sexually available, and I can barely recall their names and faces now, so completely did Amalie take over my erotic life. And I had always been perfectly casual about allowing my girls to know I had others, it was after all the sexual revolution, and I did the same with Amalie, and amazingly she said I had to stop if I wanted to keep company with her, and even more amazingly, I did. I called up my current ladies one after another and kissed them off, so to speak.

Because-and this is the whole point of this long excursion-being with Amalie was better than sex. It was mystical. It was as if you could lean into a sunbeam and it could support you. Colors were brighter, music was more enticing, everything moved slowly, elegantly, like a grand entrance of ancient royalty, caressed by perfumed zephyrs. I had heard of stuff like this, but I thought it was all figures of speech. The moon did not hit my eye like a big pizza pie, but short of that, all the songs came true.

Eventually, I did seduce her, in the time-honored and honorable old way: that winter we were married, in the Liebfrauenkirche in Zurich, with her large and very proper Swiss family in attendance, banker dad and professor of linguistics mom and the six siblings, all blond and rosy-cheeked, and none of them thinking that she had carried off the prize, but everyone was as polite and correct as could be. My sister and brother came too. Miri happened to be on a fashion shoot in Paris and arrived with her coke-fiend Eurotrash husband, Armand Etienne Picot de Lavieu, and Paul came from his studies in Italy, so it was convenient. Maybe they would have still come had it not been, but that’s something I was not sure of at the time. Dad was uninvited and absent. It was all something of a blur, actually, as I imagine weddings always are to the principals. The only thing I recall is Paul gripping me hard above the elbow and saying, This is a keeper, kid, don’t fuck it up. And that Miri cried and, as far as I could tell, remained drug-free during the event.

We went on our honeymoon to Zermatt and stayed in the family chalet and skied. Or she skied. I mainly fell down and watched her zoom gorgeously down the pistes, and afterward participated in what was then and yet remains the most terrific sexual experience of my life. An orgasmic calliope. She made a sound like doves, the delighted uohh uohh uohh they produce, from almost the moment we started, and she was able to generate a nearly epileptic crescendo in which Time quite stopped, as it is supposed to do in heaven, existence without duration. Naturally, within six months, as I said, I had started sleeping around again, although I was able to keep this secret for many years, taking clever advantage of Amalie’s near inability to think badly of anyone. No excuse, sir: it was evil plain and simple, evil black as night. I did fuck it up, as Paul feared, which is why he grasped my arm so tightly on my wedding day, leaving a bruise.

And having ruined paradise, I have for years desired to return there (without, naturally, having to make any major changes in my spiritual state) and have nurtured a longing for a new and fresh Amalie, but this time one not quite so good, someone more along the lines of me, but not too much like me, if you take my meaning, but with the same electricity and without the unbearable burden of guilt that I bring to relations with my wife. Which is why I have made this long excursion, to make it clear what was happening in the Brooke Russell Astor Reading Room. A fresh start, and there she was with her tiny blond braids and her Amalie-esque look, shaking my hand with the tingles goosefleshing up my arm.

I asked her what she was doing, and she pointed to a thick volume open on the desk. Something my uncle wanted me to research-family history. I gestured to chairs and we sat down. It was a library, so we had to speak softly, and since we had to, it was necessary for me to have my head closer to hers than ordinary interlocution would require. She wore a light perfume, floral.

“You’re an academic too, I gather?”

“No, I work for the ministry of education in Toronto. This is more of a sideline, and to help him out.”

“But he’s deceased.”

“Yes. I thought I could finish up the work and arrange for a posthumous publication. I think he would have liked that.”

“You were close, then?”

“Yes.”

“Although separated by oceans?”

“Yes.” Then, somewhat impatiently, with a little wrinkle forming across her fine high forehead, “My uncle Andrew was a very important part of my life, Mr. Mishkin. My father left my mom when I was four, leaving us in a very precarious financial position. He was something of a wild boy and not at all interested in fatherhood. He’s dead now, as is my mother. Uncle Andrew, meanwhile, paid for my education, had me over to England during practically every summer vacation starting at age eight and…oh, God, why am I telling you all this? I guess I haven’t quite recovered from the shock of what happened to him. I’m sorry. I hadn’t intended to spill my guts like that.”

“It’s quite all right,” I said. “Losing a close relative through violence can be a devastating thing.”

“You sound like you speak from experience.”

“Yes,” I said, but in a tone that did not encourage further queries. Changing the subject, I asked, “How long have you been in the city?”

“Toronto?”

“No, here. I’m sorry-when New Yorkers say ‘the city’ they always mean the island of Manhattan.”

She smiled at this, our first shared smile. “Since Monday. Two days.”

“In a hotel, are you?”

“Yes, the Marquis on Eighth Avenue. I was expecting to stay in Uncle Andrew’s place, but there are legal complications. It’s still a crime scene and they won’t release any of his things, although Professor Haas very kindly let me look through his office and take some personal items.”

“You’re comfortable there?” Making conversation here, God knows what I was thinking, I suppose I just wanted to keep her talking, prolong the moment. Ridiculous, as I say, but in the interests of an honest tale…

She replied, “Well, to be frank, it’s fairly grotty. It’s supposed to be cheap, but cheap in New York is more than I can afford, especially with Canadian dollars.”

“You’ve seen the police?”

“Yes. Yesterday. I thought I would have to identify the body like they do on TV, but that had already been done. They asked me some questions, really, pretty awful questions.”

“This is their theory that he was killed as part of some gay sexual ritual?”

“Yes, but my God!-and I told them this-Uncle Andrew wasn’t like that at all. He made no secret of his, um, romantic orientation, but he was devoted to Ollie. He’s a don at Oxford. They were like an old married couple when they were together.” Her tone abruptly changed and she asked, “Do you think we can conclude our business today?”

“Our business being…?”

“Uncle Andrew’s manuscript.”

Oh, that! I asked her what she knew about it.

“Oh, he didn’t tell me much, only that it was a Jacobean manuscript. He paid several thousand dollars for it, but he thought it might be a lot more valuable if some things checked out.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. He didn’t say.” Again she produced that adorable wrinkle. “And frankly I can’t see that it’s any business of yours. It’s my property.”

“Actually, Ms. Kellogg,” I said, somewhat prissily, “it’s the property of the estate. In order for you to claim it, you have to demonstrate both that you are who you say you are, and that you are the sole legal heiress of Andrew Bulstrode. In order for that to happen, you must produce a will and have it probated in surrogate’s court for the County of New York. Only then will the executor of the will have the authority to instruct me to hand over the estate’s property to you.”

“Oh, gosh! Will that take long?”

“It could. If the will is faulty or contested, it could take weeks, months, even years to settle. As in Dickens.”

At this she gave a despairing cry, bit her lip, and brought her hands to her face. The clerk at the desk looked over at us disapprovingly.

“I can’t wait that long,” she wailed. “I could only get these few days off. I have to be back in Toronto on Monday and I can’t afford to stay in a hotel. And…” Here she stopped and dropped her eyes, as we do when we are about to reveal something it’s best not to reveal. Interesting, that; I thought it might be part of why she was reluctant to come to my office. I decided to push on that door.

“And…?”

“Nothing.” A poor liar, I thought, observing the delicate flushing below the jawline.

“Well, not nothing, I think. You ask me to meet you in a secluded place, you keep looking up at the door, as if you expect someone to barge in, and now you seem to be concealing something. Add to that the fact that your uncle died in mysterious, even frightening circumstances, and you strike me as a woman with something of a problem. A woman who, if I may be so bold, needs…”

“A lawyer? Are you volunteering yourself?” Suspiciously.

“Not at all. You need an estate lawyer who can help you get through probate. I am not that kind of lawyer, but my firm has some good ones. I was thinking of volunteering myself as your friend.”

“You think I need a friend?”

“You tell me. I’m guessing that you were approached about this manuscript and that this approach was of a disturbing nature.”

She nodded vigorously, causing her braids to wiggle. Delightful!

“Yes. I got a call just after the police called me and told me Uncle Andrew had died. It was a man with a deep voice and an accent.”

“An English accent?”

“No, like Slavic or Middle Eastern. I sort of yelled at him because I was so upset, I’d just found out that Uncle Andrew had died and here was this vulture circling. I hung up and he called right back and his tone was…I mean it sounds stupid to say ‘threatening’ but that’s what it felt like. He offered me fifty thousand Canadian for the documents, and I told him I’d think about it. He wasn’t happy with that answer, and he said something like, I forget his exact words, something like it would be better for you in every possible way to agree to these terms. It was like that line from The Godfather, an offer you can’t refuse, and it was so unreal, I almost giggled. Then, after I got to the Marquis, I got called again, same voice. How did they know I was there? No one at home knew where I was staying.”

“No significant other?” Concealing the hopefulness.

“No. And my office has my mobile. Anyway, when I left the hotel this morning there was a car, one of those big SUVs, black, with smoked windows, parked down the block from the hotel and there was a man, a big man, with a bullet head and sunglasses, leaning against it. And I looked back after I passed him and he was looking at me with this really horrible smile and then he got into the car, and I took the bus here, and when I got to the library the car was there again.”

“That’s worrisome,” I said.

“Yes, it is,” she said after a long pause. Her voice was a trifle shaky.

“Look,” I said, “let’s say that the police are wrong about your uncle’s death, as you suggest, and that he was murdered. Murdered for this, um, document. Melodramatic, yes, but such things must happen occasionally. So assume for a moment that this item is extraordinarily valuable for some reason, way more valuable than fifty grand Canadian, and that criminals have somehow learned about it and are trying to obtain it by fair means or foul. Does that make sense?”

She nodded slowly. I thought I saw her shiver, and I wanted to fling my arms around her, but forbore.

“Yes, in a horrible way,” she replied, “but I can’t imagine what it could be. I mean the value part. Uncle Andrew said he paid a few thousand for it and that’s probably near what it’s worth, or else why would the seller have sold it? And if for some reason it turned out to be more valuable, why would criminals be involved?”

“That’s the question, of course, but my sense is that it’s not the document itself that’s valuable, but what it leads to. Did your uncle tell you anything about that?”

“No. As far as I knew it was a Jacobean letter of some sort, of purely academic interest. He was really excited about it, and made a special trip to England last summer to check up on some things related to it, but he didn’t imply that it had any, well, pecuniary value. Did he tell you what it was? I mean what it might lead to.”

“Yes, he claimed it was an actual Shakespeare autograph manuscript, but I’m afraid he might have been unduly optimistic. Later, I spoke with Mickey Haas, and he suggested that this was unlikely, and that your uncle seemed to be somewhat desperate to, as it were, recoup his fortunes.”

“Yes, he was, he tended to be like that since the scandal. You know about that?”

“I’m familiar with the facts, yes. But he must have been aware of this criminal interest, since he deposited the damned thing with me. He must have suspected he might be attacked and wanted to preserve it from being taken. So…to continue, the first order of business would seem to be securing you personally. You clearly can’t return to your grotty hotel. We could change hotels…”

“I can’t afford to change hotels. It was all paid in advance anyway. Oh, God, this is turning into a nightmare…”

“…or, if I may, I have a large loft downtown. There are two bedrooms in it where my kids stay when they’re on school holidays. You could have one of them. It’s probably nearly as grotty as the Marquis, but free of charge. I also have a driver to take you around town. He used to be sort of a bodyguard.”

“A bodyguard?” she exclaimed and then asked, “Whom did he guard?”

“Yasir Arafat, actually. But we like to keep that part quiet. I can’t think of anyplace you’d be more safe.” Except from me, but let that pass for the moment. Honestly, I was not thinking of that at all when I made the offer. I recalled the terror on her uncle’s face quite well and did not want that look ever to appear on hers. “Once you’re stashed, we can see if we can learn something about the people involved from their vehicle. I’ll alert the police to this development and leave that part to them.”

She agreed to this plan after the usual polite demurrers. We left the reading room and then the library. At the top of the steps I steered her into the shadow of the porch columns and peered out at Fifth Avenue. There was no black SUV with smoked windows in sight. I called Omar on my cell and told him to meet us on the Forty-second Street side and then we hurried through Bryant Park and were waiting for the Lincoln as it pulled up.

My loft is on Franklin Street off Greenwich. It’s four thousand square feet in area, and the building used to be a pants factory, later a warehouse, but now it is chockablock full of rich people. I got into it before downtown real estate became psychotic, but it still set me back a bundle, and that doesn’t count the improvements. We used to live here as a family, Amalie, the kids, and me, until she moved out. Usually the guy moves out, but Amalie knew I really liked this place and also she wanted to be closer to the kids’ school, which is on Sixty-eighth off Lexington. They’re all now on East Seventy-sixth in a brownstone duplex. We split expenses right down the middle, because she has a good income and sees no reason why I should be beggared simply because I am a sexual asshole.

At the time under discussion, however, I was not thinking about that. I was showing Amalie 2 (aka Miranda Kellogg) around my dwelling. She was suitably impressed, which I found an improvement over Amalie 1, who was never impressed by things money could buy. I ordered Chinese takeout and we ate by candles at a low table I have from which you get a nice, if narrow, view of the river. I was a gentleman, and reasonably honest as we ate and exchanged histories. It turned out she was a child psychologist by training, working as a midlevel bureaucrat. We talked about Niko, my boy, and his problems. She was sympathetic in a rather distant way. As I became more familiar with her face, I decided that she did not resemble Amalie quite as much as I had originally thought, not feature by feature, but still there was that feeling of bubbling excitement when I looked at her. How little we know, how much to discover, from lover to lover, as the song has it.

She began to yawn, and perfectly proper, I made up the bed in Imogen’s room. I gave her a new white T-shirt to sleep in, and of course I had fresh toothbrushes because of my kids. I got sleepy thanks and a nice kiss on the cheek. What was that perfume? Elusive, but familiar.

The next day, we rose early, breakfasted on coffee and croissants, in a mood that was more companionable, I must admit, than it would have been had this been a Morning After. She had a certain distancing air about her that did not encourage aggressive intimacy seeking, which was fine with me: another reminder of Amalie back when. She dressed in the same little department-store wool suit she had worn the previous day, and Omar took us up to my office. Once there, I introduced her to Jasmine Ping, our brilliant estate lawyer, and left them to plumb the mysteries of probate and also help arrange for the transfer of Bulstrode’s body back to England.

My diary tells me I spent the morning dissuading a writer from suing another writer for stealing her ideas and from them producing a far more successful book than the writer’s own, and later on the phone with a fellow at the U.S. Trade Representative setting up a meeting about (what else?) Chinese IP pirates. A typical morning. At twelve-thirty or so Miranda appeared up at my office and I suggested lunch. She refused, I insisted, at which she shamefacedly admitted that she was still too frightened to wander freely in public and wished to eat in the office or be driven back to the loft.

We therefore ordered from a deli, and while we were waiting, Miranda broached the subject of the manuscript. She said that under her uncle’s tutelage she’d become an efficient reader of Jacobean secretary hand: could she not look at it now? I hesitated but saw no real objection. Heirs often make independent judgments on the value of prospective inheritables. I sent Ms. M. down to the vault.

While we were waiting our lunch arrived and we ate, sitting at my glass coffee table. She was a precise eater, tiny bites. We talked about IP and her uncle’s visit here, but she had no more idea about why he wanted or needed an IP lawyer than I did. Ms. Maldonado came back with the folder.

Miranda pulled on cotton gloves before she handled the stiff brown pages. She held several up to the window to examine watermarks. But the day had gone dark, with the beginnings of a spattering rain. She had to use the desk lamp instead.

“Interesting,” she said, and again as she passed the pages before the light. “This heavier paper is what they call a crown folio sheet, marked with the coat of arms of Amsterdam, which comes from a well-known paper house and quite common in the seventeenth century. The pages look like they were ripped out of a ledger. These other sheets seem to be printer’s copy and unrelated.” She mentioned the name of a paper maker, but I have forgotten what it was, and then she discoursed briefly about the provenance of paper. In one ear and out the other. She drew a folding magnifying glass from her handbag. “Do you mind?” she asked.

I did not. I was content to watch her. She studied the pages; I studied the swan of her neck bobbing above them and the tendrils of hair that moved delicately in the faint breeze from the heating system. Time passed. I doodled at some paperwork, without enthusiasm. The noises of the office outside my door seemed to come from another world. She read four pages. From time to time she would mutter. Then she positively gasped.

“What?”

“The writer of this thing, Richard Bracegirdle-he claims to have sailed with Somers. He was on the wreck of the Sea Adventure. Oh, God! My hands are shaking.”

I asked what was handshakingly important about it.

“Because it was a famous event. The governor of the Virginia colony was aboard. They were wrecked on Bermuda and they lived off the land and built a ship and got back to Virginia. Some of them wrote accounts of it, and we believe that Shakespeare used them to create the atmosphere of Prospero’s island in The Tempest. But if this guy knew Shakespeare in 1610 as he claims…I mean he might have been with him, feeding him tropical color while he was writing. This alone makes it…look, Mr. Mishkin…”

“Please, you’re a guest in my house. I wish you’d call me Jake.”

“All right-Jake. I have to study this manuscript. Would it be possible for us to take it back to your place?”

My first instinct as a lawyer was, of course, to refuse. Lawyers famously have free access to money and valuables belonging to others, and the first step on the slippery slope is handling these with anything but the most rigid propriety. Carry a manuscript out of the office for the perusal of a putative heiress and pretty soon you’re hanging the client’s Renoir in the small bedroom and taking the family to Saint Bart’s on the decedent’s yacht.

Yes, that, but she was looking at me with hope, her cheeks still aflush with the thrill of discovery, and here I thought of Amalie, who never asked me for anything, who expected me to know what she wanted through mystic bonds of affection. At which I inevitably failed. It’s nice to be asked. So I said that I supposed that would be all right, since legally they would not be out of my personal possession. I obtained a stiff folder and placed the Bracegirdle material into it. I called Omar, grabbed an umbrella and my briefcase, and after speaking with Ms. Maldonado about various things, I left the office with Miranda beside me. As it happened, I had promised to pick my children up at school and take them home. This was somewhat awkward, but Miranda was after all a client and not radioactively intimate with Daddy, or not yet, anyway. I made the pickup, introduced the kids, and it was a perfectly pleasant ride. Imogen was unusually charming and wanted to know if Miranda spoke French, being Canadian, and was told she (embarrassingly) had no talent for languages at all, and Niko entertained us all by making knots in a piece of rope, many many knots, all carefully explained as to provenance and use and topological features. I was delighted that Miranda was kind to the boy-many people are not, including me-and thought it presaged well for our future.

After dropping them off, we continued south (slowly, because of the gloom and the increasing rain), and during this ride, after the obligatory compliments about the kids, Miranda was uncharacteristically chatty about the wonders of Bracegirdle’s screed. I should recall this conversation but I do not and don’t feel up to fabricating it, as I have the others above. It’s nearly three and I will need to get some sleep shortly. In any case, we arrived. Omar departed.

But no sooner had his taillights vanished around the corner than we heard the high whine of spinning tires against wet paving and a large black SUV, a Denali, came barreling around the Greenwich Street corner, skidded to a halt in front of us, and disgorged three men. These men were all wearing hooded sweatshirts and leather gloves, and they all three came rapidly toward us in a menacing manner. One of them made a grab for Miranda and I stabbed him in the face (quite ineffectively I’m afraid) with the ferrule of my umbrella. This was wrenched from my hand by the larger of the other two men while his companion slipped behind and grabbed my arms. The big fellow moved in to deliver a disabling blow to my midsection; probably he was planning a few others to make up for the umbrella-stabbing.

I am not much of a fighter, but I have spent a good deal of my free time in saloons, and there is a certain species of feisty little guy who, when loaded, cannot resist picking a fight with a big guy, especially when they look somewhat out of shape and un-Schwarzeneggerish, as I do. So I was not as unused as most men in my profession are to physical violence. There are not that many heavyweight lifters around, and these people simply had no idea what I was.

First I flexed my arms and broke the grip of the man behind me and in the next instant I had squatted down and spun on my heel, so that I faced the thighs of my erstwhile captor. I grabbed both his legs around the knees. My hands are immense and very, very strong. I felt the big man on whom I had just turned my back starting to clutch at my neck, but now I stood up again, raising both arms above my head. The man I had grabbed only weighed about 180, so he went up quite easily. I took a step away, pivoted again, and hit the big man on the head with his friend. A human body makes a very inefficient club, but as a demonstration of strength and as a way to demoralize one’s opponents, especially the club person, it is hard to top. The big fellow staggered back, slipped on the wet pavement, and went down on his butt. I whipped my club around my head a couple of times and flung him out into the street.

Regrettably, in order to perform these feats I had to drop my briefcase, and the man who had grabbed Miranda threw her roughly against the side of my building, snatched up the briefcase, shouted something to the others in a foreign tongue, and made for the Denali. The others picked themselves up from the ground and also fled, screaming imprecations. The vehicle screeched away too quickly for me to get the plate numbers. I went to see if Miranda was all right, which she was, although her wrist was strained and bruised where the thug had held her and her hand and knee were scraped.

She impatiently dismissed my concern over her injuries and asked, “Did they get your briefcase?”

“I’m afraid they did and I hated to lose it. I’ve had it since I passed the bar.”

“But the manuscript…,” she wailed.

“The manuscript is perfectly safe,” I assured her. “It was in the lining pocket of my raincoat.” I was about to tell her that I always carry items of particular value on my person, since the day when, still in law school, I had left my old briefcase on the Boston subway and in it the only copy of a Con law paper representing several hundred hours of tedious work, but instead she seized my face and kissed me on the mouth.

THE BRACEGIRDLE LETTER (7)

Now on a daye some weekes after oure coming Mr Keane was killed by a great balle: one moment I spake him & the next there stoode he without a head & fell. And where was I then? The gonnes were let to another maistre who hadde his owne people & so stoode I in Sluys with scarce a dodkin in purse & no Dutch in my mouth neither: but one day wandering idel by the harbour there I spied the Groene Draek & went on it & spake to Captain & sayde I can serve gonnes as well as anie man & he said well I know lad but say thee, knowest thou my trade? For he spake good Englishe & I saying no sir he sayde I am a pirate & a smuckler, a word I knew not & he opened the meaninge as: one who defraudeth His Majesty of duties, tonnage poundage &c. Soe will you serve my gonnes in that trade he asketh, it be bloudie & cruel, but we earne gold. And I sayde yes sir being verie hungrie & I said to myself privilie well it is but papistes we kill. And I wished verey earnest to have gold.

Wee sayled out from Sluys & othere portes of Hollande a scourge to the Spanish shipping from the German Sea to Biscays Bay & took many a vessel & slew many Spanish & some French & also ran in to England by night & landed cargoes of silks, spices, wines & spirites under the noses of the coste guardes. Meantimes whilst wee layde in port I made perfect my fancie of a distance-quadrant, having a man in Rotterdam fashioun one out of brasse, the lines cut in with aqua fortis upon the quadrantes with thereto a little mirroir so one could see through bouth sightes at one glance. With this set upon a raile wee then laded all oure gonnes with such quantitie of poudre as would carry shotte a certayne distance, I will saye eight hundred yards. Thus ready I peer into my device set with the angle before-figured to that distance on the moveable arm & peering down the sight I wait until the target appears in both mirroir & plain sight & there you have your range exact & give the order to fyre & all balles striking home all at once without warning or casteing shottes they are surprized & overcome & we board & take them easie.

Soe two yeares on the seas & I have 80 sovereigns in gold that I left with a Jewe of Sluys to keep. For the crew spent all in drink & whores but not I. In the Yeare Nine as all knoweth a truce wase signed between the King of Spain & the Dutch & the Stadthouder orders no more robbyng of Spainish shippes. But Van Brille says wee are not ordered to stoppe smuckling as that is no affayre of the Stadthouder d-mn his eyes. So we continued in this wise but I was uneasey & one daye I went to my Jewe & he writes me a bill of paper saying that what Jewe soever I should shew it to from Portugale to Muscovy will give me suche a sum in gold. Wee went over to England one night & whilst wee were ashore a-trading oure stores with certayne men of Plymouth I walked off into the darke & was done with smuckling or so I thought.

In Plymouth some daies passed at the Anchor Inn thinking upon what I should do when comes a man seekyng mariners & others for the voyage of the Admiral Sir Geo. Somers to Virginia in the New World & I thought me this be a sign what I should do & I says to hym I am a gonner afloat or dry & can take the starres in sight by crosse-staff or back-staffe to tell latitudes & can make survey if required. & he says canst walk upon water too or need you a boat, & all there assembled laughed: but he bade me come with him to see Mr Tolliver the master of the flag-ship Sea Adventure. He greetes me kindly & askes I show him my mettel: soe I doe & he being well-satisfied I can doe all I profess with passynge skille I sign as maistre gonner 1s 4d diem.

We sayled on second June the Yeare Nine. After the Groene Draeck I find the ship like almost the palace of some lord so spacious was it & well-appointed & the food far better, no Dutch cheese & fish & hock wine but goode beer & English beefe: soe I wase well contente. I fell in friendlie with Mr Tolliver & learned from him more of the art of the compass & use of the back-staffe & how to figure longitude from the starres, a thyng most difficult to doe well. He was a most strange man his lyke I had never met before this, for he did not credit Gods grace & thought there wase not a farthing to chuse between the papist superstitioun & the reformed faith: for he believed God had made the worlde & then left it to be what it might, like a wyfe setting cakes out to cool & cared not for us creatures a whit. Wee would argue such matteres on the night watch til dawn brake: but it booted little for wee never did agree as he would not accept the authoritie of Scripture at all. Wast thou there he sayde when it was took down? Nay? Then how know you it is Gods word & not wrote by some foole such as yoursen? He had no feare of Hell-fyre neither, sayde he had never seen a devil nor an angel nor had hee ever met one fellow (saveing a few mad) who ever had. He thought church could doe no harme for the moste of mankynde & went glad enough o’ Sunday but cared not what was the service or the sermon: if the Kinges grace should saye worshipe a mere stone or else the Pope he wold be content to doe it. It was all one to hym: & I was amazed at this for how could all the world think these thynges the most grave of all thynges & hym not: & hym yet a goode, kynde man with all his wittes?