The Book of Air and Shadows (18 page)

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.

T
HE
B
RACEGIRDLE
L
ETTER
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