The Book of Air and Shadows (21 page)

Crosetti handed the letter back with lead in his belly. He had to clear his throat heavily before saying, “Well. Good for her. I didn’t know she had family in England.”

“Oh, yes,” Glaser replied. “She once mentioned that the name was originally Raleigh, as in Sir Walter, and she implied that there was some connection to the famous one. Maybe she inherited the family castle. That’s quite a sale, anyway. I always figured our Carolyn was heading for higher things than bookstore clerking. Did you print out those auction notices I wanted?”

“This morning. They should be in your in-box.”

Glaser nodded, grunted an acknowledgment, and walked off, and Crosetti clumped down the stairs to his cave. It was a more pleasant work environment than it had been before the fire, for the insurance had paid for a complete renovation, including neat steel shelves and a new Dell computer with all the latest stuff attached. The cellar now smelled of paint and tile adhesive instead of dust and cooking grease, but the improvement did not noticeably help Crosetti’s mood. Each time “How could she?” appeared in his mental theater, the answer came swiftly: “Schmuck! You had one date. What did you expect, love forever? She got a better deal and split.” On the other hand, there was Crosetti’s devout belief that the body never lied, and he could not accept that Rolly had lied to him in that way, that one night. She was a liar, sure, but he could not accept that sort of falsehood. Why should she? To repay him for a nice evening? It made no sense.

And speaking of lies, went the inner voice, that letter was complete
horseshit. We know she didn’t break those volumes, therefore didn’t sell the prints. He was as sure of that as he was about the honesty of the flesh. So where did she get the nearly six grand she paid out to Glaser? Answer: someone supplied it, plus the costs of travel to England, and for this the only suspect was Professor Bulstrode, for there was no one else on the scene who both had that sort of money and was in England. She had gone to England with Bulstrode. But why? Kidnapped? No, that was absurd: professors of English did not kidnap people except in the sort of preposterous movies that Crosetti despised. Then why did she go?

Two possibilities presented themselves, one unpleasant, one frightening. The unpleasant possibility was that Carolyn saw the opportunity for a big score, the possibility of actually finding the supposed Shakespeare treasure. She’d read Bracegirdle’s letter and called Bulstrode behind Crosetti’s back (that long wait outside her loft!), set up the sale of the Bracegirdle manuscript, pressured Crosetti to sell, and then—he wanted to think—fallen a little in love but not quite enough to make her willing to miss the opportunity to get out of a life of crushing poverty.

The frightening possibility was that she was acting under duress, that Bulstrode had something on her, a threat far worse than just losing her clerk’s job and having to deal with the cops. No, that was another lie—the cops were not after any Carolyn Rolly, not according to his sister anyway. But maybe it was a little of both, a carrot and a stick. He had to have new information. Information was what allowed you to separate the lies from the truth.

As soon as this thought appeared, Crosetti swiveled in his chair and faced his new computer. He actually did have some new information, and because of the moping he’d been doing lately he hadn’t thought to use it. From the back pocket of his jeans he extracted the two items he had scooped from the street outside Carolyn’s former home. The photograph was a one-hour-photo print of two women and two children, a boy of four or so and a baby girl. One of the women was a younger Carolyn Rolly, with her hair jammed up under a feed cap, and the other
woman was a pretty blonde. They were sitting on a bench in some kind of park or playground, in summer sunshine, the trees around them, heavy with leaf, throwing dark shadows on the ground. They were looking at the photographer and smiling, with the sun in their faces making them squint slightly. It was not a good photograph; Crosetti knew that the cheap instant camera it was taken with could not deal with the contrast between bright sun and shade, and so the faces were washed out, especially those of the kids. But Carolyn had kept it and then walked away from it, as if abandoning her life once again. He studied the silvery faces, looking for signs of family connections, but again there was too little information.

He scanned the photograph into the computer, called up PhotoShop, and played with the contrast for a while, and then downloaded a program he’d used before that enhanced just such photos, using statistical methods. The result was a better look at the family, because now it was clear that it
was
a family. This had to be Carolyn’s sister, or at least a first cousin, and the two kids were clearly related to either or both of the women. Crosetti could not have said exactly why he knew this, but he was from a large family, and from a social and ethnic stratum where large families were common, and the fact was instinctively clear to him.

The picture on the postcard bore the legend
CAMP WYANDOTTE
done in what was supposed to look like birch sticks, and depicted a fir-lined mountain lake, a dock, and some boys canoeing. The message side had a three-year-old postmark and said, in childish block printing: Dear Mommy Im haveing a good time at camp. We catched a snake. I love you Emmett. It was addressed, in an adult hand, to Mrs. H. Olerud, 161 Tower Rd., Braddock PA 16571.

Turning to the computer, Crosetti generated a map of the address, which turned out to be in western Pennsylvania, near Erie. He used Google-Earth on the address and brought up the roof of a modest frame house with outbuildings, surrounded by scrubby woodlands. Zooming out from that image showed a semirural neighborhood like those that surround the smaller, tired towns of the American Rust Belt: five-acre plots, broken cars and appliances in the yards, woodpiles: scruffy zones
inhabited by people who used to have good manufacturing or mining employment and now barely got by on sporadic work or McJobs. Did this milieu spawn the exotic creature that was Rolly? He looked again at the photograph of the two women and the kids at the playground and wished that he were thirty years in the future when Google (he was sure) would let you google the interiors of all the houses and study the faces of all the inhabitants of the planet. At present, however, a journey would be required.

B
RACEGIRDLE
L
ETTER
(8)

G
osh, I’m sorry,” she gasped, pulling away from me in confusion. “You must think I’m awful. I don’t even know why I did that.”

“An instinctive reaction to danger escaped?” I suggested. “A kind of inherited reflex. The male rescues the female from danger, and saves the woolly mammoth cutlets, and the female repays him with a sexual display.” I added, after a pause, “I’m sure it was nothing personal,” hoping the opposite. She just stared at me. I opened the door to the building. “Are you all right? You’re not hurt?”

“A little bruised. And my knees are scraped. Ow!” At this, she staggered against me, trembling.

“We’re three flights up,” I said and put my arm around her shoulders. “Can you walk?”

“I don’t know. I just went all weak in the knees.”

“It’s the adrenaline. Here, let me help you.” With that I picked her up in the approved carrying-over-threshold manner and ascended the stairs.
She slumped against me and did not object. Myself, I was still dizzy from the kiss.

I settled her on a sofa, supplied us both with a cognac, and went to fetch my first-aid kit and a plastic bag of ice. She had removed her ruined panty hose and had her skirt hitched up to expose her naked thighs. I gave her the ice bag to use on whichever of her bruises seemed most to need it while I bathed and dressed her knees as I had learned to do long ago in the army. I had to lean fairly close in order to pick out the tiny pieces of street debris. The erotic charge I received from this labor was nearly too much to bear, my face there close to, inches from, her delicious thighs, these lolling slightly open to enable my ministrations. I imagined she felt this too, but she said nothing, and I was able, just, to keep from diving headfirst into the shadow of that hitched-up skirt. I suppose I wished to hang a little longer under that delicious tension, something I got to enjoy when I was courting Amalie, and which we have most of us lost in this era of copulation lite.

She didn’t speak while I worked on her. When the dressing was complete, she thanked me and asked, “What did you do to that guy? Some kind of judo?”

I answered that I was a stranger to any martial art, but simply very strong, and I explained why. She took this in without comment and asked if I knew any of the muggers.

“No, of course not. Did you?”

“No, but I thought one of them was the same one who was watching me the other day, the big one who you hit over the head with his friend. It looked like the same SUV too. They were speaking Russian, weren’t they?”

“I believe so. I don’t speak it myself, but I go to a gym run by a Russian and I hear the language a lot. And you had that man on the phone with an accent….”

At this Miranda twisted her body so that she faced the back of the sofa and clutched a throw pillow over her head. Muffled sounds emerged.

Is this level of detail important? What does it matter at the present
remove what one person said to another? For the record: she cried, I comforted her. And yes, I am enough of a cad to seduce a woman in an extreme state of dependent panic. She sighed and fell against me, her mouth against my neck. I scooped her up and carried her into my daughter’s bedroom. I put her on the bed and carefully removed her clothes—blouse, skirt, bra, underpants—she not helping much but not objecting either. I have to say that it was not, despite my ardor, anywhere near the Top 40, not remotely in the same class as Amalie, although their bodies were remarkably similar, the musculature and structure of the limbs, the pointed pink nipples.

Miranda lay not exactly comatose but as one in a dream, eyes closed. Something was going on, because she was making those little puffings with her lips that some women do when they are experiencing sexual pleasure, and she did that head-coming-up-off-the-pillow thing a few times, with her wide brow furrowed, as if in quiz-show concentration. In the end she made a sharp single cry, like a small dog hit by traffic. Then she rolled over without a word and seemed to go to sleep, in the manner of a guy married for years.

On the other hand, the first one
is
occasionally a dud. I kissed her on the cheek (no response) and covered her with a duvet. In the morning, I heard the shower go on early, and when I arrived in the kitchen she was there, fully dressed, looking fresh, asking if we could stop for a new pair of panty hose. No comment on the sexual events of the previous night and none of that familiarity of the body one more or less expects after a fuck of whatever quality. Nor did I raise the subject at that time.

I must have
drifted off because it is light and my watch says it is after six in the morning. There is a thick fog on the lake and dew gleams on every leaf and needle of the trees. The risen sun is only a bright pink glow in the clouds over the eastern shore of the lake. Very strange and unearthly, like being inside a pearl. My pistol is broken open on the desk, the magazine removed and the seven bright 9 mm Parabellum rounds are lined up next to it like toy soldiers. I have no memory of do
ing this. Could I have done it in my sleep? Perhaps I’m going slightly nuts, from the tension and the lack of sleep and from my perfectly fucked-up life. Seven rounds. There were originally eight.

You know, you read in the paper about people who have a firearm in the house and the kid gets hold of it and does something awful, the lesson being that kids will always find the gun, no matter how carefully the parent has hidden it, but as far as I know none of us ever found our mother’s
Pistole-
08, none of us even knew she had it. I suppose she was a genius at concealment, a trait her children have inherited to an extent. My siblings don’t know I have it, or perhaps they are themselves concealing this knowledge. It took some doing, since technically it is an unlicensed weapon, but those with connections can usually get what they want in the city of New York, and at the time of my mother’s death I was working for one of these, a fine legal gentleman named Benjamin Sobel. When I explained the situation to him he arranged for the police to return the thing to me, although I did not expatiate upon its provenance. A valuable souvenir of the war, I explained, that could be sold to pay for the funeral expenses. But I didn’t sell it, and the expenses were slight. Paul was in jail, and Miri was off on someone’s yacht, and so it was a small band of strangers at the cheap funeral home, some people from her church and her work at the hospital, and me; her priest did not show, I assume because of the circumstances of the death, one of the sins for which I have not been able to forgive my church.

I kept her ashes in a tin can in my apartment until I got my first job and then I bought her a slot in a community mausoleum at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, not too far from Albert Anastasia, Joey Gallo, and L. Frank Baum, the author of
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,
so she’s in good company. I believe I have forgiven her, although how does one really tell? I have never figured that part out. I know she was making a point because she knew I was on my way back to Brooklyn that Saturday afternoon. As the Official Good Son, I often submitted to mass at St. Jerome’s, preceded and followed by heavy Teutonic dinners and evenings of TV or cards. This particular Saturday, she had actually put the dinner on, sweet and sour tongue with dumplings, one of my favorites actually,
and its odor filled the apartment as I walked into the kitchen and found her. She had arranged the chair she sat in just so and spread newspapers all around so as not to make a mess when she put the muzzle in her mouth.

I relate this to demonstrate my near-perfect insensitivity to the interior states of my dear ones, which I suppose is a key to some aspects of this story. I really had no idea at all, although I saw poor Mutti nearly every week. Yes, Ermentrude played her cards pretty close, but still, shouldn’t I have suspected something? Some terminal depression? I did not, nor was there a note. Forty-four years old.

Earlier, before I entered my terrible puberty, we were unusually close. During my ninth year, by some happy coincidence, I had an early school day and my mother had moved to the late shift at her hospital, so we met and had biweekly Oedipal Theater. She would bake treats for me on those days, marvelous Bavarian delights rich with nuts, cinnamon, raisins, stuffed into leaf pastry thin as hope, and the smell would hit my nose in the hallway as I left the urine-stinking elevator, like a presagement of paradise. And we would talk, or she would talk, mainly reminiscences of her girlhood, her marvelous girlhood in the New Germany—the music, the parades, how beautiful the men looked in their uniforms, how wonderful her father, how kind everyone was to her. She actually served as one of those little blondies you see in old newsreels presenting a bouquet to the Führer on an official visit. It was set up through her dad’s contacts in the Party, and she recalled every detail, how proud she was, how the Führer had cupped her little face in his hand and patted her cheek. Yes, the cheek I kissed every day. Lucky Jake!

About the bad stuff that came later, not so much talking. I don’t like sinking about zose days, she said, only of zhe happy times I like to sink. But I pressed and learned about the rats and the flies, the absence of pets, the smell, what it was like to be bombed from the air, more about the smells, the exploded bodies of her friends and their parents, the peculiar juxtapositions created by blast, the bathtub blown through a schoolhouse wall and resting on the teacher’s desk. How the children laughed!

When I cleaned out her stuff I found a trove of family memorabilia that she’d never shown us, but which she must have been carrying around in her suitcase when she met Dad: letters home from the various fronts, photographs of the family, school certificates, vacation postcards. It included a good deal of Nazi stuff, of course, awards from the SS, my grandfather’s various medals, and the rosewood presentation case for the pistol. One photograph in particular I rescued and later had framed, and it is still in my bedroom. It is of her family, just before the war started, at some beach resort. She’s about ten or eleven, lovely as a nymph, and the two older brothers are there in their old-fashioned knit bathing suits, grinning blondly into the sun, and my grandmother is looking quite svelte in a one-piece suit, reclining in a deck chair and laughing; and leaning over her, sharing the joke, is the then Hauptsturmführer-SS Stieff. He has obviously just come to the beach from work, for he is in tie and shirtsleeves and carrying his tunic, accoutrements and hat, and unless you look very carefully, you can’t see what kind of uniform it is.

I like this picture because of how happy they all look, although they lived under the worst regime in human history and the father of the family worked for an organization bent on genocide. In contrast, there are no such pictures of my family, for although we had our laughs, my father was not into photography, and, unlike his late father-in-law, had a positive horror of being captured on film. The only family pictures we have are stilted department store poses taken on our birthdays or else records of events—first communions, graduations, and so on, plus many snapshots taken by neighbors or strangers, for, as I have suggested, with the exception of myself, my family is unusually photogenic.

No, let’s tear
ourselves away from the distant past (if only!) and back to the main story. Miranda and I agreed that she could not be left alone. I made arrangements for Omar to come by and exercise his protective skills, and further arranged that he should stay over and add a little firepower in case they tried anything else once they found that the briefcase lacked what they wanted. This left the question of why Russian-speaking
toughs had become interested in Richard Bracegirdle’s personal history. Could Bulstrode have had some original connection with them? I asked Miranda and she looked at me like I was crazy. Uncle Andrew hardly knew anyone in New York aside from scholars, and he had never so much as mentioned any Russians, criminal or otherwise. Freelance thugs then? More likely. Despite the fictions of TV, organized crime has become somewhat more Russian in the past few decades: the Mafiya, so called, but not by the Russians. Someone looking for frighteners, strong-arm guys, torturers, had found a contractor. Who this person was remained obscure, but finding him (as I now explained to Miranda) was not our job. What we had to do was keep her safe, which I thought Omar could handle, and turn the recent developments over to the police.

Around eight, a fellow called Rashid came by from a hire agency to drive me to work. I left Omar in the loft with Miranda, with instructions not to let her out of his sight, and I cut short his eager description of how well armed he was. I didn’t want to know. At the office, I called Detective Murray and related what had happened the previous night. He asked if I had the license plate of the car and I said I hadn’t and he said he didn’t see that there was much that he could do about the loss of a briefcase, and he’d transfer me to an officer who’d give me a case number for my insurance. I got a little steamed at that and pointed out that this incident must be related to the murder of Andrew Bulstrode, which he was supposed to be investigating, and there was a pause on the line after which the detective asked with heavy patience how I figured that. And then I told him about Ms. Kellogg and how someone with an accent was trying to get an old manuscript from her, one that Bulstrode had owned, and how the men who had attacked us had spoken in what seemed like Russian, and it had to be all connected. He asked me what this manuscript was worth and I told him Bulstrode had bought it for a couple of thousand dollars, but…

And here I checked, because all beyond that was speculation, all the Shakespeare business, and I knew how it would sound to a New York cop, and so I concluded the conversation rather lamely and suffered being put on hold and, when at last unheld, reported the petty mugging to
a bored man and received my case number. Then I called J. Ping and got the scoop on the status of Bulstrode’s will, with which she saw no obvious trouble, perfectly straightforward, a month should see it through surrogate’s court, and asked me if there was any big rush on, and I said, no, quite the contrary, no rush at all. The decedent’s body, I learned, was due to be flown out that day, in care of one Oliver March, presumably the longtime companion I had heard about.