The Book of Air and Shadows (27 page)

S
omeone once said, Paul Goodman I think, that stupidity was a character defense and had little to do with intelligence, one reason the so-called best and brightest got us into Vietnam and why people who are smart enough to accumulate huge piles of wealth persist in doing things that get them major jail time.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
, as, reportedly, my maternal grandmother used to say, quoting Schiller: against stupidity the gods themselves struggle in vain. In any case, it was stupid to tell my son about the gangsters and then my wife—no wait, the
font
of the stupidity was not
immediately
surrendering the Bracegirdle manuscript, after which no gangster would have had any interest in me or mine.

As I’ve said, Amalie is ordinarily of saintly mien, but like Our Lord when confronted with hypocrisy or injustice she has the ability to generate anger sufficient to wither fig trees. After she had wormed the whole tale out of me, in horrible little snips mixed with futile lies, I got the full blast of it, such that the resources of even her perfectly fluent English for
insulting my intelligence were exhausted and she had to switch over to German:
saudumm, schwachsinnig, verblödet, verkorkst, vertrottelt, voll abgedreht,
and
dumm wie die Nacht finster sein,
to recall just a few. German is rich in such expletives, and they often filled the air of my childhood home. “Stupid as the night is dark” was in fact one of Mutti’s favorites. Finally:
du kotzt mich an
, which is quite vulgar and means roughly, “you make me puke.” With that, I was out on the street. I had received the reaming in near silence, conscious of a perverse pleasure in having at last violated the holy patience of my spouse. I called Rashid, he arrived in minutes, he stepped out to open the door for me (something that Omar has been told not to bother with), and I noticed he was looking upward and I did too as
Paphiopedilum hanoiensis
came flying from the top floor of Amalie’s house, just missing my car and smashing its new pot on the street. I had made her both angry and violent—a good night’s work and another down payment on my condo in Hell.

That, as it turned out, was the
best
part of the evening. After Rashid dropped me off and I stuck my key in the street door I noticed that it swung open before I’d had a chance to turn the lock. Someone had jammed the latch with a bit of duct tape. Heart in mouth I raced up the flights. The door to my loft hung open. Inside, in the narrow hallway that leads to the bedrooms, I found Omar. He was on his hands and knees groaning and seemingly examining a bright red oval on the polished oak floor, for blood was dripping down either side of his face from a wound in the back of his shaved skull. I lifted him up and into an armchair and obtained a clean dishcloth, a basin of water, and a bag of ice from the kitchen. When I had the wound washed and the bleeding under control, I asked him what had happened. I recall feeling an unnatural calm as I sat there listening to his groggy mumbles—in Arabic to begin with—a calm that recalled my army days as a medic, when the wounded were unloaded in large numbers from the dust-off helicopters after a firefight: the first moment you wanted to run away screaming and then came the unnatural calm that enabled you to work on mangled boys. I wanted to run screaming now through my loft to see what had happened to Miranda, but I made myself sit and ask and listen. There was not
much to tell. He had heard a woman’s shout and a heavy thump and come running in from the living room where he had been watching cable news. That’s all he remembered. He didn’t see anyone. Miranda, of course, was gone, as was the original of the Bracegirdle manuscript.

I found Detective Murray’s card in my wallet and called him and left an urgent message and then dialed 911. After this we had the sort of confused interaction of many strangers, of the sort that’s always cut away in television dramas about crime and emergency, but which in real life absorbs many frustrating hours. Paramedics removed Omar, although he insisted upon walking down the stairs under his own power, and I entertained the police, first a pair of uniformed officers and then a pair of detectives, Simoni and Harris. They examined the front door of my loft and declared that the lock showed signs of picking, which made the affair more serious, not so much a domestic thing, which is what I imagined they thought when they arrived—a bleeding man, a missing woman, rich people, unholy liaisons…still, they couldn’t keep the snarkiness out of their voices. I imagined they were searching for some witty remark, of the sort that the scriptwriters used to put in the mouth of Jerry Orbach on the old
Law & Order
. They wanted to know who Omar was and where he came from and what was his relationship with the missing woman; and there was Omar’s pistol to explain, and my idea of the threat against Ms. Kellogg and what had happened out on the street with the maybe Russian thugs. Ms. Kellogg was staying here with you? Why wasn’t she at a hotel? Was she your girlfriend, Mr. Mishkin?

No, she was not; no, I did not know why anyone would have taken her; they only wanted the manuscript. Why did they want the manuscript, Mr. Mishkin? Was it very valuable? Not as such, but some people thought it could lead to something very valuable. Oh, like a treasure map? Here the eye rolling started, the smirking. And here I said something like, “You can smirk all you want to, but a man was tortured to death to reveal the whereabouts of that thing, and now a woman has been kidnapped, and you’re still treating the whole thing as a joke.” And then we had a discussion about Professor Bulstrode.

In fairness, this was the sort of thing that urban police detectives
rarely encounter. They
wanted
it to be a domestic with elements of rich-guy looniness. The police covered surfaces with black fingerprint powder, took many photos, took Omar’s gun and samples of the blood he had shed in my service, and left, saying they would be in touch. As soon as they were gone I went out myself, to the garage on Hudson where Rashid had parked the Lincoln, and drove to St. Vincent’s Hospital to check on Omar. I was unsurprised to see the two detectives there, and I couldn’t get in to see him until they had finished extracting the nothing he knew. The hospital wanted to keep him overnight for observation because of the concussion, and so I left him with the assurance that I would contact his family and that he must not worry about the expenses.

I made that unpleasant call from my cell phone and I was just putting it away when it buzzed again and it was Miranda.

“Where are you? Are you all right?” was naturally (and stupidly) the first thing out of my mouth, although I knew she could not answer the first question and that the answer to the second was dreadfully patent.

“I’m fine.” In a voice that was not fine at all.

“Where are you?”
Stupid!

“I don’t know. They put a bag over my head. Look, Jake, you can’t call the police. They said I should call you and tell you that.”

“All right, I won’t,” I lied.

“Is Omar all right? They hit him….”

“Omar is fine. What do they want? They have the goddamned letter—why did they have to take you?”

“They want the other letters, the ones written in cipher.”

“I don’t understand—I gave you everything that your uncle gave me. I don’t know anything about any cipher.”

“No, they were there in the original find. There’s a woman here, Carolyn—I think they’re holding her too….”

“A Russian?”

“No, an American. She says that there were coded letters in the package but someone didn’t deliver them like they were supposed to.”

“Who didn’t?”

“It’s not important. These people say they own the documents, they
say they paid my uncle cash for them, a lot of cash, and that he tried to cheat them. Jake, they’re going to…”

Actually it’s too painful to try and reconstruct this dialogue. We were both yelling into the phone (although I am ordinarily careful never to raise my voice into a cell phone as so many of my fellow citizens do, so that the streets often appear to be taken over by the mad; and I often wonder what the truly mad think of this) and someone cut her off in midsentence. The burden of the conversation was clear; unless I came up with some ciphered letters mentioned by Bracegirdle they would handle her as they had her uncle, and also that, if they thought that the police were involved, they would dispose of her instantly.

Gunshots in the
fog, three flat, concussive noises from the lake, and there is definitely the sound of a motor craft, an insectile buzz that sounds as if it comes from a long way off. Hunters? Is this duck season? I have no idea. In case not, I have just reloaded and cocked my pistol, a comforting activity I find. I should have said before this that Mickey’s cabin is at the extreme southern end of Lake Henry. There is a detailed hydrographic chart of the lake framed on the living room wall, and on it you can see that it was originally two lakes. Around 1900, the summering plutocrats who owned the land dammed an outlet and the water rose and left a string of islands extending out from the eastern shore, an excellent place to play pirates, Mickey has informed me, but you can’t drive a boat of any size between them because of hidden rocks. You get to this house either via New Weimar and a long slow drive down a third-rate road and a further drive on a gravel one (which is what I did) or you can get off the thruway at Underwood and take a short drive on a good road to the town of Lake Henry at the lake’s extreme northern tip and get into your mahogany speedboat and, after a twelve-mile jaunt, arrive in more style, which is the route Mickey and his family almost always traveled. The land route is actually shorter by a little over an hour, but a lot less comfortable. If I were a stylish sort of thug, I would rent or buy a motor craft, come south from the town, whack my guy, and then on the way
back dump the corpse, suitably weighted, into the lake, which is nearly sixty feet deep at its greatest depth, not quite farther than did ever plummet sound, but deep enough.

Examining my diary
for the following day I find that the morning meetings are scratched out and I remember that I called in after a nearly sleepless night and spoke with Ms. Maldonado. I asked her to cancel these appointments and reschedule them and asked her one important question, to which the answer was yes. Ms. Maldonado makes two copies of absolutely everything, she is the Princess of Xerox, and it turned out that she had indeed made copies of the Bracegirdle manuscript. Then Omar called me begging to be rescued from the hospital, so I went and got him. He took the wheel gladly, looking in his white medical turban more like his desert ancestors than he usually did. As he proudly informed me, he had another gun; I did not wish to inquire further.

At my direction, we picked up the Bracegirdle copies at my office and proceeded north on the East River Drive to Harlem. Although I questioned him again about the previous night’s events, he could add nothing, except an apology for having been cold-cocked and losing his charge. He could not imagine how someone had got into the loft and into position to surprise him in that way, and neither could I—another mystery added to those already accumulated in this affair.

Our destination that morning was a group of tenement buildings on 151st Street off Frederick Douglass Boulevard that my brother, Paul, owns, or rather operates, since he doesn’t officially own anything. He picked them up as burned husks at a tax sale some years ago when buildings of this type were burning almost daily and has renovated them into what he refers to as an urban monastery. Paul is a Jesuit priest, a perhaps surprising revelation, since the last time I mentioned him he was a jailed thug. He is still something of a thug, which is why I went to visit him after Miranda disappeared. He has a profound understanding of violent evil.

I suppose that one of the great shocks of my life was the discovery that Paul was smart, probably smarter than me in many ways. Many families
assign roles to their members, and in our family Miriam was the dumb beauty, I was the smart one, and Paul was the tough one, the black sheep. He never did a day’s work in school, dropped out at seventeen, and as I mentioned, did a twenty-six-month jolt in Auburn for armed robbery. You can imagine the fate of a handsome, blond, white boy in Auburn. The usual choice is to be raped by everyone or raped exclusively by one of the big yard bulls. Paul chose the latter course as being healthier and safer and submitted to this fellow’s attentions until he had fashioned a shank, whereupon he fell upon the yard bull one night while he slept and stabbed him a remarkable number of times (although fortunately not quite to death). Paul spent the rest of his prison time in solitary, along with the child molesters and Mafia informants. He became a reader there, which I know about because every month I used to make up a package of books for him in response to his requests. In two years I observed in amazement his progression from pulp fiction, to good fiction, to philosophy and history, and finally theology. By the time he made parole he was reading Küng and Rahner.

Upon his release, he immediately joined the army, having no other prospects and desiring an education. This was at the height of the Vietnam War and they were not being too particular. I suppose the grand-paternal Stieff genes must have kicked in because he proved to be an exemplary soldier: airborne, Ranger, Special Forces, Silver Star. He spent his two tours largely back in the Shans, as we used to say, in the contested region where Laos, Vietnam, and Cambodia come together, running with a band of montagnards just like Marlon Brando in
Apocalypse Now
. This is virtually Paul’s only comment on that experience:
it was just like the movie
.

Strangely enough, the horror, the horror, did not make him into a monster but into something like a saint. He went to St. John’s on the G.I. Bill and then signed up for the Jesuits. When he told me this I thought he was joking, I mean the notion of Paul as a priest, much less a Jesuit, but it goes to show that you can never tell about one’s near and dear. I was, as I say, totally flabbergasted.