The Book of Air and Shadows (28 page)

In any event, he returned to New York with the idea of building a kind
of settlement house in a blighted neighborhood, and so he did, but being Paul and considering the social experiment tradition of the Society of Jesus, the thing had a certain twist; he was easily distinguishable from Jane Addams. I say he was a saint, but he also remained a thug. There are a number of these types in the calendar of the saints, including, for one, the founder of Paul’s own order. Paul’s theory is that our civilization is collapsing into a dark age and that the advancing edges of this are visible in urban ghettos. He says dark ages are all about forgetting civilization and its arts and also the increasing reluctance of the ruling classes to pay for civic life. This sealed the fate of Rome, he claims. He doesn’t think that the ghetto needs uplift, however, but rather that when the crash comes, the poor will survive better than their masters. They need less, he says, and they are more charitable, and they don’t have to unlearn as much. This was why Jesus preferred them. Yes, quite crazy; but when I observe the perfect helplessness of my fellow citizens of the middle class and higher, our utter dependence on electricity, cheap gas, and the physical service of unseen millions, our reluctance to pay our fair share, our absurd gated enclaves, our “good buildings,” and our incompetence at any task other than the manipulation of symbols, I often think he has a point.

So Paul has constructed, under the guise of a mission church and a school, a kind of early medieval abbey. It consists of three buildings, or rather two buildings and the empty space between them once occupied by a tenement totally gutted by the fire and later demolished. This space is fronted on the street by a wall and a gate and through this gate walked Omar and I that day. It is always open. (We left the limo on the street. Such is the authority of the place that I was sure no one would molest it.) The footprint of the former building is now a sort of cloister, with a vegetable garden, a little terrace with a fountain, and a playground. One of the buildings is a K–12 school, partially residential, and the other consists of offices, dormitories, and workshops. There is a L’Arche community on site, which is a group that lives with and cares for severely disabled people, and there is also a part-time medical clinic and a Catholic Worker soup kitchen. The place was its usual chaos: the halt, mad, and crippled doing their thing, clumps of robed rehabilitated
gangsters working at various tasks, and neatly uniformed schoolchildren racing about, quite the medieval scene. Omar always feels entirely at home here.

I came to Paul on this occasion because his intelligence has a devious edge to it, rather like that of our dad. I am an infant in comparison, and although it often galls me to depend on my brother in this way, I occasionally do. He says it is good for my soul.

We found him in the basement of the school building discussing a boiler with some contractors. He was wearing a blue coverall and was quite filthy, although Paul makes even dirt look good. He is somewhat shorter than I am but far more elegantly built. To my eye he has not changed much from what he looked like when I picked him up at the airport on his return from the army nearly twenty-five years ago, except his hair is longer on top. He still resembles Rutger Hauer in
Blade Runner
or an SS recruiting poster. He gave us a big smile, white teeth gleaming in the dim basement, and embraced both of us. Leaving the contractors to their work with a few more words, he ran us up to his office, a tiny cramped room with a view of the terrace/cloister and the playground, and of course he wanted to know about Omar’s head. I think he likes Omar somewhat more than he likes me. No, that’s a lie, but let it sit there on the page. Paul loves me, and it drives me nuts. I am not at all nice to him. I can’t help it. I think it is Izzy’s introjection boiling up from inside me, full of contemptuous disdain.

After Paul got the whole story out of Omar, and after he’d heard a good deal of tedious data about Omar’s family and the suffering of his relations on the West Bank, Omar excused himself for his noon prayers. Just after he left, an exquisite brown boy trotted in with a message, looking remarkably fine in his school uniform, which is a navy blazer, gray slacks, white shirt, and a white-and-black striped tie. When he had gone I said, rolling my eyes, “Getting any of that now? Peachy buttocks glowing in the dim sacristy lamplight…”

“Elderly nuns satisfy my residual lusts, thank you,” he said, still smiling. “And speaking of sexual excess, you seem to have got yourself in a jam again over a woman. Who is this Miranda?”

“No one special, just a client. I only had her stay at my place because some people seemed to be following her.”

“Uh-huh. You know, Amalie called me this morning. She seemed pretty upset.”

“Well, gosh, Paul, I’m sorry Amalie’s upset. I know! Why don’t
you
marry her. Then you can be all perfect together and I can sink further into depravity. Me and Miri—”

“Miri’s worried about you too. What’s all this about Russian gangsters?”

Another thing that drives me crazy is my family talking about me behind my back. One reason I try to live a blameless life (the sex part aside) is to reduce the zone of gossip, but clearly I have failed in this. I suppressed whatever I might have felt at the time because the entire purpose of my visit was to seek Paul’s counsel in this affair. No one I know has a wider network of contacts at all levels of society in New York, from street bums to the mayor. So I gave him the whole tale—Bulstrode, the Bracegirdle manuscript, the murder, the mugging, the conversation with Miri (although he knew about that already from her), meeting Miranda, her abduction, and the phone call.

He listened more or less in silence and when I’d finished, he made a rotating motion with his hand and said, “And…?”

“And what?”

“Did you? With Miss Kellogg? No, don’t bother to lie, I can see it on your face.”

“And this is the most important thing to you? That I fucked this woman? The murder, the kidnapping, that’s all irrelevant compared with where I stick my schlong?”

“No, but where you stick your schlong seems to determine the course of your life, and messes up the lives of a number of people I love. Hence my interest.”

“Oh, I thought that fucking was the
only
thing the church was interested in. Or were you not speaking ex cathedra?”

“Yeah, you persist in thinking lust is your problem. Lust is not your problem, speaking ex cathedra, and in a dozen or so years it’ll have taken
care of itself. It’s a miserable little sin after all. No, your problem is acedia and it always has been. The refusal to do necessary spiritual work. You always took on the responsibility for every bad thing that happened to our family, probably including World War II, all by yourself….”

“You were in jail.”

“Yes, but irrelevant. God wasn’t in jail but you didn’t ask for any help in that direction. No, you took it all on and failed, and you never forgave yourself, and so you think you’re beyond all forgiveness, and that gives you the license to hurt all the people who love you because after all, poor Jake Mishkin is so far outside the pale, so bereft of all hope of heaven, that anyone who loves him must be delusional and thus not worth considering. And why are you grinning at me, you turd? Because you’ve made me say the same thing I always say when you come up here and now you can forget it again, even though you know it’s true. Sloth. The sin against hope. And you know it’s going to kill you someday.”

“Just like Mutti? Do you really think so?” A high-pitched grinding sound came from the machine shop below, where they repaired bicycles. He waited until it stopped and said, “Yes, I do. As you know. Like the man said, God who made us without our help will not save us without our consent. Either you’ll cry mercy and forgive and be forgiven, or die the death.”

“Yes, Father,” I said, looking piously upward.

He sighed, tired of the pathetic old game I make him play. I was tired of it too but could not keep my clawed fingers away from the unendurable, unsalvable itch. He said, “Yes, you’ve manipulated me into preaching and you have therefore won yet again. Congratulations. Meanwhile, what are we going to do about this problem of yours?”

“I don’t know. That’s why I came to see you.”

“You think this Russian, Shvanov, is involved?”

“As muscle, yes. But I can’t figure out who’s behind it.”

“Why bother? The manuscript is gone, and this woman disappearing seems like a matter for the cops.”

“I was told not to involve the cops. She said they’d kill her.”

“And you feel it’s your responsibility to rescue her.”

“I said I’d protect her and I didn’t; so, yes I do.”

“You want to continue the affair. You’re in love.”

“What the hell does that matter? She’s a human being in mortal danger.”

He steepled his hands against his chin and gave me an uncomfortably penetrating stare, which is what he does now instead of kicking my ass. Then he said, “Well, of course I’ll help in any way I can. I have a couple of contacts down at Police Plaza. I’ll make some calls, get some background on this guy Shvanov, and also get the word out that this is serious—”

“No, don’t do that! Don’t involve the cops at all. You have other kinds of contacts.”

“I do. All right, I’ll see what the street has to say.”

“Thank you. The main thing I’m worried about is Amalie and the kids. If they want to put more pressure on me…”

“I’ll take care of that too,” he replied, after a brief considerate pause. This, of course, is what I had come for. Paul knows a lot of tough kids, what they call original gangsters, in that neighborhood, and he has an odd relationship with them. He thinks they’re exactly like the Germanic or Slavic barbarians that the missionaries who were sent out in the dark centuries met and converted—proud, violent, hungry for they know not what. In the early days of the mission Paul had to literally fight people on the street to demonstrate that he was tougher than they were, which he was. That he had a rep, that he was known to have stabbed people in prison, didn’t hurt. That he had personally killed more people than all of them put together, and looked it, was another plus.

Also, Paul claimed that compared with the montagnards, New York gangbangers weren’t very tough. None of them had ever missed a meal and if imprisoned had been housed in what would have seemed luxurious spas to the average Hmong. He said his guys over there could have eaten all the Crips, Bloods, and Gangster Disciples for breakfast. And their pathetic bravado inspired compassion in him rather than the terror common among the better classes. (Paul is not afraid of anything mortal, nor was he at ten.) But he took them seriously as tribes, and like the Jesuits of old he targeted their leaders, the most violent of the violent,
and over time had come to a concordat of sorts with them, which was that there was to be no dope sold and no whores run within a certain pale around Paul’s buildings, and that people fleeing the vengeance of the street could find sanctuary within. Some few of the street lords have actually been converted. A larger number sent their children or their younger brothers and sisters to be educated at his school. It was a very Dark Ages arrangement and perfectly natural to a man like my brother.

Now I could see that Paul, having made his decision to help, couldn’t wait to get me out of there. Not a comfortable man, my brother, sort of like Jesus in Matthew, always at the run, impatient with the apostles, conscious of the shortness of the time, the need to get the successors up and ready for when the founder must leave the scene. He just turned away and started talking to some boys, and so I collected Omar and made my grateful exit.

In the car
we headed west and south until the Columbia campus hove into view. I generally have a pretty good idea of Mickey Haas’s schedule and so I knew that Thursdays he held office hours all morning. I called him and he was in and yes he’d be glad to have lunch with me, at the faculty club for a change. I have always found the dining room on the fourth floor of Faculty House at Columbia one of the more pleasant places to lunch in New York: a beautifully proportioned airy chamber, with one of the best views of the city from its high windows, and a perfectly adequate prix fixe buffet, but Mickey prefers our usual Sorrentino’s. I think it’s because he likes to get somewhat drunk at our lunches and prefers to do this out of sight of his peers. Perhaps he also enjoys having my limo sent for him.

Just before we reached the club, my cell rang and it was my sister.

“You were right,” she said. “Osip would really like to meet you.”

“That was fast,” I said. “He must owe you a favor.”

“Osip doesn’t owe favors, Jake, he collects them. As a matter of fact,
he
called me and asked me to set it up. That’s not a good sign.”

“I’m sure it’ll be fine,” said I, not at all sure. “Where and when?”

“Do you know Rasputin’s? On Lafayette?”

“You have to be kidding. That’s like meeting John Gotti in a Godfather’s Pizza place.”

“What can I say? Osip has a sense of humor. Anyway, he says he’ll be there after ten tomorrow tonight. I would say ‘be careful,’ if it weren’t too banal for words. But you
will be
careful, won’t you? If not, I assume you’ll want to rest beside Mutti in Green-Wood. I’ll send the most vulgar wreath imaginable.”

I recall that
Mickey and I had the roast beef and shared a bottle of Melville cabernet, so appropriate, he joked, for a professor of English. Mickey was actually in a pretty good mood, and I asked him if his financial position had improved at all and he said it had: here followed a blizzard of information about hedge funds and REITs and commodities trading that went in one ear and out the other. Sensing my disinterest, he politely changed the subject and asked me what was new with me. In answer, I drew out the copy of Bracegirdle’s letter I had picked up from Ms. M. that morning and slid it across the table. “Only this,” I said.

“This is it? The Bulstrode thing? Good God!” Naturally he could read the Jacobean scrawl as easily as you read Times New Roman, and he began to do so at once, rapt, and ignored the waiter when he came to ask about dessert, a unique occurrence in my experience. Twenty or so minutes passed as he turned the pages, occasionally making a quiet exclamation—“Holy shit!”—and similar while I drank coffee and gazed at the diners and played eye games with an attractive brunette at another table. My inner theater was showing what it usually did after a meeting with my brother: a thoroughgoing denigration of him and his works, who did he think he was playing the great blue-eyed white god descending upon the ghetto unasked to bring salvation to the darkies! It was absurd, nearly obscene, nearly Nazi in its colossal arrogance. The sad pleasure of this shadow play ceased only when Mickey beside me said “Wow!” loud enough to draw the attention of the brunette and several others.