The Book of Air and Shadows (11 page)

T
o my credit, I suppose, I did not immediately race back to the office after the two detectives left. I finished my normal routine at the gym and took a shower and had a steam before returning. In the car, I admit I was not as engaged as I usually am with Omar's conversation. Omar worries a little obsessively about our involvement in Iraq and in general about the relations between his adopted nation and the Islamic world. His experience in this city after 9/11 has not been pleasant. This particular morning, as the radio murmured the latest bad news, and Omar put in his comments, the only atrocity that engaged me was the grim fate of my late client, Bulstrode. Could he actually have found a document that led to an invaluable manuscript? And had someone killed him to find out where said document was? There followed the even less pleasant thought: torture meant a desire for information, and what information did Bulstrode have to give out but the name of the person to whom he had given his manuscript, which was me? I did not really know the man, but I did not consider for one second the possibility that when
they put the pain on him he would be able to conceal the location of that fat envelope.

Again, as with the cops, the feeling of unreality, the slipping into the forms established by fiction. Shortly after I graduated from college, that being still the era of the draft, and not being the resistant type, I yielded to the inevitable and volunteered myself (virtually alone among my graduating class I believe) as a draftee. They made me into a medic rather than an infantryman, and I ended up in the Twelfth Evac Hospital in Cu Chi, in South Vietnam. Unlike my S.S. grandfather, I was an entirely undistinguished soldier, being what was then known as a rear-area-motherfucker, or white mouse, but I did see an ammo dump spectacularly explode after being hit by an enemy rocket, and I recall all the witnesses thereto, in order to validate the experience, repeatedly using the phrase “it was just like the movies.” Thus, although life is by and large unthrilling, when we do find ourselves in the sort of situation upon which thrillers dote we cannot really experience it, because our imaginations are occupied by the familiar tropes of popular fiction. And the result of this is a kind of dull bafflement, and the sense that whatever it is cannot
really
be happening. We actually think that phrase: this
can’t
be happening to
me
.

Back at the office, I obtained the safe-deposit box key from the place where Ms. Maldonado keeps it, having waited for her to be away from her desk. I retreived the Bulstrode envelope and took it back to my office. Ms. Maldonado looked at me inquiringly when I returned her key, but I did not offer to explain, nor did she ask. I said I wanted to be undisturbed until further notice and locked my office door.

I am no expert, but the papers from the envelope looked genuinely old. Of course, they would, if forgeries, but clearly
someone
believed in their validity, assuming Bulstrode had been tortured to reveal their whereabouts. There were two separate series of papers, both clearly in English, although using a style of handwriting I could not easily read, except for the shortest of words. One was marked up in what looked like soft pencil.

I put the papers into a fresh manila envelope and shredded the old one, after which I returned them to the bank. Then back to business for
the rest of the afternoon. The next day, my diary tells me, I had lunch with Mickey Haas. We do, or did this, on average once a month or so, with him usually making the call, as he did this time as well. He suggested Sorrentino’s near my place, and I said I would send Omar to pick him up. This is our usual practice when he comes downtown. Sorrentino’s is one of a large number of nearly interchangeable Italianoid restaurants that dot the side streets of midtown on the East Side of Manhattan, and which live by serving somewhat overpriced lunches to people like me. The more prosperous denizens of this great mass of Manhattan office space each have a favorite Sorrentino’s; it is much like being at home, but with no domestic stress. They all smell the same, they all have a maître d’ who knows you, and what you like to eat and drink, and at lunch they all seat at least two interesting-looking women upon which the solitary middle-aged diner can rest his eyes and exercise his imagination.

Marco (the maître d’ who knows me in particular) seated me in my usual table in the right rear and brought me, unbidden, a bottle of his private
rosso di Montalcino
, a bottle of San P., and a plate of anchovy bruschetta for nibbles while I waited. After about half a glass of the delicious wine, Mickey walked in. He has gained a good deal of mass over the years, as I have, although I am afraid that his consists almost entirely of fat cells. His chin has clearly doubled, where mine retains something of its former line. His hair, however, is still thick and curling, unlike mine, and his mien confident. On this occasion I recall that he appeared uncharacteristically haggard, or maybe haunted would be a better word. The skin under his eyes was bruised looking, and the eyes were bloodshot and pinched. He was not exactly twitching, but there was something wrong. I’ve known the man for years and he was not right.

We shook, he sat down and immediately poured himself a glass of wine, of which he drank half in one go. I asked him whether anything was wrong and he stared at me. Wrong? I just had a colleague murdered, he said, and asked me hadn’t I heard and I told him I had.

Reading this over, I just decided that from now on I’m going to concoct dialogue, like journalists seem to do with impunity nowadays, because it is a pain in the ass to paraphrase what people say. The fellow
who invented the quotation mark was no fool; if only he had established the copyright! Thus:

I asked, “When
did you hear about it?”

“My secretary called me in Austin,” he said. “I’d just given my paper at the morning session, and of course, I had my cell off and as soon as I turned it on there was Karen’s message. I flew back right away.” He drank off his glass and poured another. “Can I have a real drink? I’m turning into an alcoholic behind this.”

I gestured to Paul, our waiter, who was there in an instant. Mickey ordered a gimlet.

“And then when I got back, chaos, needless to say. The university was going ballistic, with the implication from my chairman, that asshole, that somehow it was my fault for obtaining the appointment for someone of dubious moral status.”

“Was he?”

Mickey flushed at this and snapped back, “The
point
is that he was also one of the great Shakespeare scholars of his generation. Our generation. And his only crime was that he was duped by a swindler, which could have happened to any one of the people who now condemn him, including my fucking chairman. Do you know this story?”

I assured him that I had perused the available material on the Web.

“Right, a fucking catastrophe. But that wasn’t what the police were interested in. They had the nerve to imply that he was living, how did they delicately put it? An irregular lifestyle. By which they meant to imply that he was queer, and that his being queer had something to do with his death.” He drank down the remains of his gimlet. Paul floated over and asked if he wanted a refill and also presented him with a menu nearly the size of a subway billboard. He glanced at it without interest, which confirmed my earlier impression that he was seriously distraught: Mickey loves food; he loves to eat it, and talk about it, and cook it, and recall it.

“What are you having?” he asked.

“What am I having, Paul?” I inquired of the waiter. It has been years since I ordered anything off the menu here.

“
Carciofialla giudia,
gnocchi
alla romana,
osso buco. The osso buco is very good today.”

Mickey handed back the menu. “I’ll have that too.”

When Paul left, Mickey continued, “They had some theory he got involved in rough trade. I mean the police imagination, right? They see Brit and gay and it’s some rent boy he hired to tie him up and it went too far.”

“Not possible?”

“Well of course
anything’s
possible, but I happen to know that Andy had a discreet long-term relationship with a fellow don at Oxford. His tastes did not run that way.”

“He might have changed. One never can tell.”

“One can, in this case. Jake, I have known the man for over twenty years.” He took a drink from his second gimlet. “I mean it’d be like finding out
you
were chasing boys.”

“Or you,” I said, and after a moment we both laughed.

He said, “Oh, God, we shouldn’t be laughing. The poor bastard! Only I’m damn glad I was a thousand miles away when it happened. The cops were looking at me with uncomfortable interest, sniffing me for the telltale signs of perverted inversion.”

“The cops were Murray and Fernandez?”

He stared at me, his smile gone. “Yeah, how did you know?”

“They came to see me, to see if I could shed light.”

“Why would they do that?”

“Because he was my client. He came to me with some story about a manuscript he’d turned up. I assumed that you sent him.”

Mickey gaped at me. Paul appeared and laid down our Jewish artichokes. When we were alone again, Mickey leaned toward me and, with lowered voice, said, “I didn’t send him. No, wait a second—he did ask me once if I knew an intellectual property lawyer and I said my best friend was one, and mentioned your name. I asked him why he was interested and he told me he’d come across some manuscripts that might be
publishable and wanted to know their status under law. And he actually came to see you?”

“Yes,” I said. “He told me he had a manuscript that revealed the whereabouts of an unknown Shakespeare manuscript….” I was beginning to relate what I had told Bulstrode when Mickey swallowed a half of an artichoke heart and coughed violently and had to wash it down with San Pellegrino before he could speak.

“No, no, he had a manuscript that
mentioned
Shakespeare. Or so he claimed. I never saw the thing myself. Because of what happened with Pascoe, he was more than a little paranoid. He made a trip to England about that time—it was last summer—and when he came back he was, I don’t know, not himself. Nervous. Irritable. He refused to talk about what he had, except that it was a completely unknown mention of William Shakespeare in a genuine contemporary manuscript. He didn’t tell me where he’d found it, by the way. I bet that’s some story!”

“You mean somebody just
mentioning
Shakespeare in a manuscript, that would make it valuable per se?”

He stopped mopping sauce with his bread: another gape here and an incredulous laugh.

“Valuable? Christ, yes! Cosmically important. Epochally significant. I thought I explained this to you any number of times, but obviously not enough.”

“Then once more, please.”

Mickey cleared his throat and held his fork up like a classroom pointer. “Okay. Aside from his work, the single greatest literary achievement by an individual human being in all of history, William Shakespeare left practically no physical trace in the world. You can just about write down everything we know for sure about him on a wallet card. He was born, christened, got married, had three kids, wrote a will, signed a few legal documents, composed an epitaph, and died. The only physical evidence of his existence besides those records and his grave is a suspect sample of what looks like his handwriting on a manuscript of a play called
The Book of Sir Thomas More
. Not a single letter, or inscription, not a book with his name in it. Okay, the guy was a luminary of the
London theater for nearly twenty years, so there are a whole bunch of references to him, but they’re pretty thin soup. The first one is an attack on someone called ‘Shake-scene’ by an asshole called Robert Greene, and an apology for printing it by a guy named Chettle. Francis Mere wrote a book called
Palladis Tamia, Wit’s Treasury
, which would have been justly forgotten except that he mentions Shakespeare as the best English dramatist. He’s mentioned by William Camden, the headmaster of Westminster, and by Webster in the preface to
The White Devil
, and there’s a mention by Beaumont in
The Knight of the Burning Pestle
. And there’s a bunch of legal stuff, contracts, lawsuits, leases, plus various theater references, plus, of course, the central fact of the First Folio. His pals thought enough of him to publish all his plays in one book after he died, and name him as author. That’s basically it—what is that, a couple dozen or so substantive contemporary references. And on this has been built an absolutely enormous scholarship, mining the plays and poems for suggestions about the man, completely speculative, of course, because we just don’t know. It drives us crazy because the guy was smoke. I mean there’s
nothing
there.”

“It was a long time ago.”

“Yes, but we know shitloads more about Leonardo, just to name an obvious example, and
he
lived a century earlier. For the sake of comparison—just one example—we have an actual letter from Edmund Spenser to Walter Raleigh explaining some of the allegories in
The Faerie Queene
. We know a
lot
about Ben Jonson. Michelangelo—there are nearly
five hundred
of his letters surviving, notebooks, fucking
menus
, and from Shakespeare, the greatest
writer
of all time, and an important theatrical entrepreneur besides, not a single letter. And the problem is that the vacuum sucks fake stuff in. There was a vast Shakespeare forgery industry back in the eighteenth, nineteenth centuries, and there’s even some today, which is how Bulstrode got caught. Not to mention the cottage industry represented by the so-called authorship question: we haven’t got anything from him except the work, ergo someone else did the work—Southampton, Bacon,
extraterrestrials
…. I mean I can’t express to you how intense the desire is to find out stuff
about the son of a bitch. If Bulstrode actually did find a contemporary manuscript that mentions Shakespeare, especially if it contained substantive information—why it would absolutely resurrect him in the field.”