The Book of Air and Shadows (38 page)

“Mother, that is so…so completely off the charts. You assume that Carolyn’s the perpetrator here on zero evidence. She could just as easily be another victim. She could’ve been tortured too, and
that’s
how whoever it is knows about the ciphers.”

“He’s right, Ma,” said Donna, as her natural defender’s personality emerged. “We just don’t know enough to speculate about the guilt of Carolyn Rolly, although unless the leak comes from Allie indirectly, the source of knowledge about the ciphers has to come from her. Meanwhile, this is clearly a criminal matter and—”

Bang.

The sound came from the street, and the three Crosettis knew immediately what it was, because they were not a family to ever say “I thought it was a firecracker or a car backfiring.” In the next seconds a fusillade sounded from the street. Everyone stood up and Mary Peg made for the cordless phone sitting on an end table. Now came breaking glass, the sound of heavy feet, and three big men charged into the room, all of them carrying large 9 mm semiautomatic pistols. One of them shouted at Mary Peg to drop the phone. She ignored him and continued to punch in 911. When the operator came on she gave her address twice and said, “Shots fired. Home invasion,” before the phone was torn from her hand and a big man grabbed her around the neck and held a gun to her temple.

T
HE
F
IFTH
C
IPHERED
L
ETTER

A
fter Shvanov left I used the cell phone to call Miriam. She was, of course, out and with her own cell phone switched off (I have never once, in more than twenty years, connected with my sister on the first try), so I left a somewhat frantic message. Why? Because no one is supposed to know Dad but the three of us? Ridiculous, but there it was, a feeling of dread.

Around ten the
next morning I received a cell phone call from a woman named Donna Crosetti, who said she was representing her brother, Albert, in the matter of certain papers fraudulently obtained by the late Bulstrode. I replied that it remained to be seen whether any fraud had taken place, but that I would be happy to meet with her, or Albert, to discuss the matter, all the while thinking that it was odd for a lawyer to be representing a family member, and odd too was the venue she proposed, a house in Queens rather than a law office. After we had arranged the meeting for that eve
ning, I dialed the number she had called from and was surprised to find it a Legal Aid office. This is yet another indication of how nuts I was then, as in my right mind I never would have agreed to such a meeting.

Meanwhile, my diary helps not at all, as I was now cut loose from my normal office routine. My appointments were cleared indefinitely, which turned out not to be such a good thing. People in stressful jobs are often told to take a rest, but sometimes it is just that stress that has held them together, like the proverbial ancient biplane kept in the air with rubber bands and baling wire, without which it falls from the sky. So, now, in unaccustomed idleness, all the little wheels started to wobble loose or jam up. I paced. I flicked channels. I watched pigeons and traffic out my window. I had a massive coronary….

What it felt like for a moment, but which was only the start of panic: short breath, sweats, tingling in arms, a little dyskinesia. The cell phone buzzed its simple factory-installed tweedle and I grabbed for it like life itself and it was Omar, and would I be going out today? Actually, I would. I had the usual number of friends and acquaintances around town, but there was only one person I thought I could go to after getting fired from my job for malfeasance, which was my wife. So I cleaned myself up, dressed casually but with care, checked my image for corporal signs of depravity, found many, took a Xanax so as not to fret about these overmuch, and away we went uptown. More
dummheit
! I always forget that my wife understands me.

I believe I mentioned that Amalie runs a financial newsletter out of a small office in our town house. This is somewhat misleading, because there is also an actual office full of gnomes down on Broad Street, and in other offices scattered throughout the planet in the time zones that matter to international money. My wife visits these as infrequently as she can get away with, because it is her fancy that she is a simple wife and mother with a paying hobby, as if she were crocheting pot holders instead of running a multimillion-dollar enterprise. It is something of a joke in the financial district, I am told, but it turns out (ask Mike Bloomberg) that after a while one’s financial information empire more or less runs itself, and the founder’s main responsibility is to resist kibitzing.

Thus I had every reason to believe that Amalie would be free for a nice consoling chat, but when I arrived at the house and was let in by Lourdes, and asked where Amalie was, she told me (with what I thought was excessive satisfaction) that Amalie was not available, that she was having a meeting. I could wait in the living room.

So I waited and fumed and wished for more drugs and got tight in the chest for what seemed like hours, but by my oft-consulted watch was less than forty minutes, until I heard voices in the hallway and sprang up and was able to witness Amalie showing out a trio of suits, who looked at me curiously, as at an exhibit (I imagined): unemployed ex-husband, lurking. Amalie, for her part, showed no surprise, nor did she introduce me to the suits but ushered them graciously out the door.

When she came back, I said, “Big meeting?” keeping the tone light.

“Yes,” she said. “What’s wrong, Jake?”

I related the law firm story in the most pathetic and self-deprecating manner possible, sitting on her/my leather couch while she perched primly on the chair opposite. I omitted only the horrible Russian of the previous evening.

“Poor Jake,” she said when I was finished. “What will you do?”

“I don’t know. Take some time off, think about life. Maybe I’ll look for this lost play.”

“Oh, don’t even joke about that!”

“Why not?” I said. “Where’s the harm?”

“The harm is that one man has been killed over this, according to you, and my children are having to be watched by Paul’s gangsters. I cannot stand to live like this, Jake. I have said to Paul, thank you very much, but please no.”

“What, no one is watching the children?”

“No, and there is no reason for anyone to bother with them because you have nothing they want any longer.” She must have observed something in my face that I was not aware of, because she added, a little more forcefully, “Or so you have led me to believe. Is there anything?”

“No,” I said quickly. “Of course not. They have the original letter already and that was all I ever had. It’s over.”

She kept looking at me as if waiting. At last I said, “What?”

“Nothing. I have nothing to say. You are the one who came to my house.”

“I thought we could talk,” I said.

“Upon what subject? Shall we discuss your new woman?”

“There’s no new woman.”

“That would amaze me. Look, we have had a terrible fight, yet
another
terrible, shameful fight about your lying and your girls, and now you have ruined yourself in your profession because of one of them, and you come back to me for…for what, I should like to know? Punishment? Shall I stand in the door like a cartoon wife, tapping my foot, with my arms folded, holding a rolling pin? Or take you back? On what basis? That you will act like a mutt dog in heat whenever you please, and I shall be waiting with the lamp in the window?”

I can’t recall what I said in reply. I can’t recall what I wanted from the wretched woman. For the past to be erased, I suppose, for a clean slate. I believe I did actually sink to the level where I appealed to her Christian charity: did she think I was beyond forgiveness? Whereupon she pointed out to me what I knew very well, that there is no forgiveness without repentance, and that I had not really repented; and then stopped herself and cried out that I was doing it again, making her feel like a damned prig and a Sunday school teacher, I am not to instruct my husband as to morals, he is supposed to know all this already.

And so on. Early in our relationship, Amalie had revealed to me that when she was thirteen her beloved dad had been discovered with an entirely separate second family on the other side of the Mont Blanc tunnel, mistress and two daughters, à la Mitterand, very high tone and civilized, of course, no question of divorce, just a continuing slow hell of silent meals and separate bedrooms and the children sent away to boarding schools. Amalie thus had a horror of infidelity, why she fled sophisticated decadent Europe for America the puritan, we are fat and stupid and lack culture but American men are perhaps not such hypocrites about their marriage vows. And married me.

Then she changed the subject, standing up, and pacing back and
forth, bent over a little, her hands stuck in the pockets of the cashmere cardigan she often wears while working. She told me that the men I saw going out were from the Dow Jones organization. They had been dickering for
Mishkin’s Arbitrage Letter
for some time and Amalie had agreed just now to sell it for a figure not quite sufficient to purchase a squadron of air-superiority fighter planes. She added that she was going to sell the town house as well and move to Zurich. Her mother was getting on and was lonely and depressed and it would do her good to fuss over the grandkids, and Amalie was angry at my nation, she did not wish to bring her children up in a christo-fascist empire, that was not what she had bargained for when first she flew the ocean to America the free, and she wanted to devote herself full-time to charitable works in the earth’s more desperate regions. And on cue I blurted out, “What about me?”

It certainly hurts when someone you have loved looks at you with pity, as Amalie did then. Now that I think about it, I should have known then that the love was still alive in my heart, or it would not have hurt so much, I could have remained the cool “separated” man about town like all the others one sees in the parks and tony restaurants on Sundays in Manhattan: uncomfortable, phony-jolly, overindulging the unhappy tykes. She lowered her eyes, as if embarrassed by what she saw, and retrieved a Kleenex from the wad that always lurked in the pocket of her cardigan, wiped her eyes, blew her nose. In my wickedness I thought, Ah, she weeps, that’s a good sign! I found myself begging her not to go, that I would be different, etc. She said she loved me and always would, and wished very much that she could be complaisant, but could not, and if I ever decided to return on terms of perfect honor to my marriage, she would see, and I said, Now, now, I
have
decided, and she gave me a searching look as only she can and said Oh, no, Jake, I am afraid you have not.

Which was true because just
before
that moment, when I thought she might roll, I was still thinking that somehow I could retrieve Miranda and clear up our little misunderstanding and have both the old and the new Amalie at my disposal. I can’t stand to type any more of this hideous account of what was taking place in my weasel mind. It doesn’t matter.

What did I do after she had, quite properly, shown me the door? I went to the gym, where Arkady welcomed me with a warm handshake, an embrace, and a false look. God knows what Shvanov had arranged to get me back in there, but it was clear that the easy gym comradeship was over. The word had apparently also spread to the other Russian lifters in the place because I was treated like a radioactive prince, no waits for the benches or machines for me! I pumped iron until I was ready to throw up, then took a painfully hot shower; Arkady’s is known for the dangerous heat of his hot water (there are even cautionary signs), and I wondered if you could accidentally on purpose kill yourself in this way. When I was meat-loaf red I turned the hot faucet off entirely and suffered under the icy drench until my teeth chattered.

I was getting dressed when my cell went off and it was my sister. Without preamble I asked her if she knew that Osip Shvanov knew our father. Sure, she said. They knew each other from Israel. What about it?

What about it indeed? The fact filled me with a particularly infantile kind of fear, where you know you have to keep something hidden from the parent without quite knowing why, only that if they found out they would act out of malice, or worse, some unconscious impulse to claim a chunk of your soul, to innocently
eat you up
.

“Jake, is there something wrong?”

Honestly, I can’t remember what I was saying that made her say that; I must have been babbling in an uncharacteristic fashion. And it brought me up short, because Miri is rarely interested in what is wrong with her loved ones, there is so much wrong with
her
that she prefers to talk about.

“Nothing,” I lied. “Look, Miri, have you, like,
discussed
this whole manuscript thing I’m involved in with anyone? Shvanov? Or Dad?”

“What manuscript thing?”

“You know, I told you about it that night at Amalie’s…Shakespeare, death by torture?”

“Oh, that. I don’t think so, but you know, I don’t keep a meticulous, like,
transcript
of everything I talk about. Why? Is it supposed to be some big secret? No, don’t leave it there! Move it over by the piano!”

“Excuse me?”

“Oh, they’re delivering something. Look I have to go, darling, these people are going to totally destroy my living room. Bye-bye.”

With that she was gone, leaving me to deal with the probability that my sister had spread the amusing story of how her brother had found the key to a fabulous treasure throughout her wide circle of friends, including quite a few in the demimonde between business and crime. Miri had never much worried about the distinction, which meant that Shvanov might possibly be telling the truth—the city was full of Russian thugs for hire, and those who had attacked me might not have had anything to do with Shvanov’s outsourced violence. But perhaps they did. Perhaps it was a vast conspiracy, watching, waiting to strike, and why had I been so stupid as to come to a gym full of tough Russians? Panic does not really stick in the mind, I believe, it is as transient as smell, although it can be brought back Proust-like by a recurrence of the original stimulus. I am a little batty now, and so I can recall fairly well my irrational desperation sitting half-naked in that wintergreen-smelling locker room. I had the cell phone in my hand and almost without thinking, I dialed Mickey Haas’s number. I left a message demanding that he contact me immediately and I must have sounded crazed because he rang me back about twenty minutes later, while I was waiting at the curb for Omar to bring the car around.

“Lunch?” I said when he was connected.

“This is a lunch call? You sounded like your pants were on fire.”

“It’s a desperate lunch call. I’m being chased by Russian gangsters. I really need to talk to someone.”

“Okay. I had something with my publisher, but I can cancel. You’ll send Omar?”

“I’ll come up. We’ll go someplace new.” Of course
they
would be watching my usual haunts…

We went to Sichuan Gardens on Ninety-sixth, somewhat to Mickey’s amusement. The place is dim and on the second floor of a commercial block, and I sat with my back to the mirrored wall where I could watch the entryway. To fine my alertness to an even higher degree I had a martini.

“So, Lefty,” he said when we had ordered, “you think Big Max got a contract out on you?”