The Book of Air and Shadows (40 page)

Then, somehow, the room was full of shouting cops, the kind with
submachine guns, helmets, and black uniforms, rather like the ones my granddaddy wore. (And how did American police come to dress like the SS, and how come no one objected to it? Or to the Nazi-style helmets our troops now wear? Where are the semioticians when we need them? All bitching about Shakespeare, probably.) Many of these submachine guns were pointed at me and I realized I was still holding the handgun on my lap, like a lady holds a purse at the opera.

I was made to lie prone and I was cuffed, but I did not get arrested, since the person directing the invasion had been a colleague of the late Lieutenant Crosetti and was, therefore, inclined to listen to sense from Mrs. Crosetti, or Mary Peg, as she has since asked me to call her. We are all buddies now, it seems. Ms. Crosetti—Donna—has appointed herself defense lawyer for both me and Omar, and for a hearse driver named Klim, who is also a Polish cryptographer working on our ciphers, as I later learned. Paramedics arrived too and declared my victims dead and carried them off, leaving a truly remarkable amount of gelling blood behind. The police took statements at the scene. Each of the participants went singly into the kitchen and spoke to a pair of detectives, whose names I have forgotten, as I have forgotten the burden of what I told them. They seemed satisfied that I acted in self-defense; I got the impression that Mary Peg disposed of a good deal of authority in the NYPD. The only people arrested were the driver of the SUV and the wounded thug, who had been picked up wandering through the neighborhood some blocks away.

Eventually the police left. They had two fall guys to blame all the gunfire on, and they could not see a way to arrest anyone else without involving the widow and son of a heroic cop. Mary Peg looked at the wreckage of her living room and began to wail and I joined her, quite disgracefully. Klim threw his arms around her and spoke softly in her ear, and Omar did the same for me. In retrospect, the story of the gunfight on the street is obvious. Omar was waiting in the Lincoln when the SUV zoomed up and the three armed men jumped out and ran into the house. Omar grabbed his gun and took off after them, but the driver shot at him, and Omar dived behind our car and returned fire. Then the hearse arrived and Klim joined the fray. Remarkably, none of the three was injured,
which shows again how paltry is the handgun for any serious slaughter, except by accident or at extremely close range against the unarmed.

Later, pizzas were ordered and we all sat around the kitchen table and ate them and drank red wine and congratulated ourselves on our survival. Donna Crosetti left, after advising her clients not to talk to the police, and Mary Peg and Albert Crosetti seemed to relax a little, and become somewhat more free in their conversation and their drinking. We had coffee made with generous slugs of Jameson whiskey. The events of the evening retreated a little, and I only burst into tears one additional time, although I was able to slip out to the bathroom before the spasm arrived. Post-traumatic stress is the current term for what you feel when you have killed another human, and it doesn’t really matter if it was justified or not, although murder is the national sport of many of the world’s nations, and thousands upon thousands of people seem to be able to do it without concern or remorse. I will probably never recover from it myself.

Actually, that’s not true. You
think
you’ll never recover, but you do, or I did. Perhaps there is more of Grandfather in me than I thought. Paul has apparently recovered from a much more extensive career as a killer, although he says he prays daily for the souls of the people he dispatched over in Asia. I don’t really know what this means, “pray for the souls.”

At any rate I emerged from the john, and none of the party adverted to my red eyes. Klim was engaged in an argument with young Crosetti that I found intriguing, in which the Pole made the case that the only thing that would stop what now seemed to be escalating violence was to retrace the footsteps of Bulstrode and to find what he had found, if anything, and if anything, get hold of it. Once the Thing was in hand, of course, and public, there would be no question of anyone needing to commit further acts of violence. If there was Nothing, on the other hand, then we would need to convince the bad guys of this, a somewhat more difficult, but not impossible, task. The important thing was to up the tempo, so that we were not reacting defensively but in control of the game. As in chess.

Crosetti was saying that no, the point was
not
to get any deeper into it, to stay close to home. If someone wanted the papers they could have them, he wanted nothing more to do with the whole thing. I felt sorry for
the kid. I sympathized—I also wanted all of it not to have happened. But I also thought that Klim was right. As long as someone with no morals and access to armed men thought we had a lead on an Item that might be worth a hundred million bucks, then not one of us was safe. Klim thought he could watch over Mary Peg well enough for a short time, and the cops would keep an eye on the rest of the Crosettis, at least for a while, as well as turning up the heat on various Russian mobsters. But that was only a temporary solution, as he pointed out. The tale of the treasure would spread in the underworld, and before long, some other fiend would take a crack at it.

Crosetti at last said, “Okay, let’s say I agree. What am I supposed to do? Wander around England indefinitely? With what for money?”

“You have savings, don’t you?” asked Mary Peg.

“Oh, right! I worked like a dog for that money. It’s for school and I’m damned if I’m going to blow it on some crazy idea.”

“I could cash in some of the IRA,” she suggested.

“What, and live on the pension? That’s nuts! You barely get by as it is.”

“Money is not a problem,” I said, and they all looked at me as if I had declared the Earth flat. “No, seriously,” I said. “I’m loaded. And I would be glad to take Albert to England as my guest.”

T
HE
S
IXTH
C
IPHERED
L
ETTER
(F
RAGMENT
1)

C
rosetti’s doubts about the rationality of the present voyage were somewhat assuaged by the thrill of traveling on a private jet. He had, of course, never ridden one before, nor had anyone he knew ever done so. He thought he could get used to it. Mishkin apparently never traveled any other way. He had a card from his firm entitling him to a certain number of hours of private jet flight and if you loaded enough people onto it, as now, it was only a little more expensive than first class, if you considered a couple of grand each a little, which Mishkin did. He had explained this to Crosetti on the ride out to Teterboro. He seemed to want Crosetti to believe he was just an ordinary guy and not an incredibly rich person. Yes, he was an income millionaire, but just barely. It was mainly that he did not really fit, physically, on commercial airliners. Otherwise, he’d be happy to line up and take off his shoes with his fellow citizens. Crosetti didn’t know why Mishkin was trying to sell him this line, but he’d noticed the same impulse in a couple of people he’d met through his film contacts, guys who’d sold scripts for six, seven figures
and were bending over backward to demonstrate that they were still just regular fellas like everyone else: I only bought the Carrera for my bad back, it’s got the most orthopedically correct seating….

The aircraft was a Gulfstream 100 and it was configured for eight passengers, and, somewhat to Crosetti’s surprise, they were carrying six: besides him and Mishkin, there was Mrs. Mishkin and the two Mishkin Munchkins (a phrase that popped into Crosetti’s mind when they arrived at the terminal and stuck there like a bit of bubble gum beneath a theater seat) and a guy who looked so much like Rutger Hauer that it was a little scary, and who turned out to be Paul, the brother of the host. Apparently, the wife and kids were going to be taken to Zurich after the stop in London, but the brother was going to come along on the Bulstrode mission.

Crosetti thought this a little peculiar, but then he was getting the impression that Jake Mishkin was not all that tightly wrapped. For example, while they waited in the lounge provided at Teterboro for private jet passengers a man arrived who was apparently one of those people upon whom business empires utterly depended, for it seemed he could not be out of touch for one instant. That his underlings were a lazy and recalcitrant lot was evidenced by his management style, which was loud—screaming nearly—and laced with obscenity. His interlocutors were told repeatedly to shut the fuck up and listen, and advised to tell other stupid motherfuckers to fuck themselves. Mrs. Mishkin was clearly upset by this person, as were the other inhabitants of the lounge. At last the churl finished his conversation with the command, “Tell that fuckhead to call me right away! This second!” He stared at the little instrument for almost a minute, mumbling curses, and then the thing rang again, with Wagner’s Valkyrie theme, and he resumed his tirade at the new fuckhead, whereupon Mishkin rose, walked over to the man, looming above him like the Jungfrau over Stechelberg. He said something in a low voice and was answered with a “Fuck off!” at which Mishkin plucked the cell phone from the man’s hand, snapped it in two, and tossed it in the trash. There was a pattering of applause from the other waiting passengers, Mishkin walked back to their group, and, after a stunned
interval, Mr. Obnoxio dashed out of the lounge, perhaps to obtain another phone or a cop, but which it was they never discovered, because at that moment a trim young woman in a tan uniform came out of a door and informed Mishkin that they could board now.

Crosetti was the last one to enter the airplane and took the remaining seat, which was leather smooth as girls and comfortable enough to qualify as a mortal sin all by itself. The uniformed woman asked him if he wanted something to drink and of course he asked for champagne and got it, a split of Krug, perfectly chilled, and a crystal flute to drink it from and a basket of little crackers and a ceramic tub of soft cheese. The man across the aisle was having a beer, but he had a little basket too. This was the brother. Crosetti examined him peripherally as the plane rolled across the taxiways. He was wearing a dark sweater and blue jeans and wore cheap sneakers on his feet. The poor relation? He was reading the morning’s
New York Times
, scanning it really, as if the news bored him, or he knew what it was going to say already. Crosetti appreciated the feeling; this was how he himself read the paper, except for the movie reviews. He wondered if the man were an actor, a terrific-looking guy really, and wondered too at the genetics that had cranked out this one and Mishkin from the same batch.

Suddenly the man snapped the paper shut, folded it, and jammed it into a seat pocket. He turned to Crosetti and said, “I’ve lost the ability to distinguish truth from fiction in the news, with the exception of the scores in sports. I don’t know why I bother. It just makes me angry without a reasonable outlet.”

“You could tear the paper into shreds and stamp on the scraps.”

The man smiled. “I could, but that sounds like something my brother might do.”

“He has a temper. That cell phone business?”

“Yes, and killing two people. But the strange fact is he
doesn’t
have a temper. He’s the mildest, longest-suffering guy in the world.
I’m
the one in the family with a temper.”

“Could’ve fooled me.”

“Yeah, but he’s not himself,” said the brother. “Violence sometimes
does that. I saw it in the army a lot. People construct a persona, a mask, and they come to believe that it’s really them, down to the core, and then events happen that they never expected and the whole thing just cracks off, leaving their tender pulpy insides exposed to the harsh elements.”

“Like post-traumatic stress?”

The man made a dismissive gesture. “If you buy psychobabble. It suits the culture to dump a whole set of unrelated symptoms suffered by completely different kinds of people as a result of completely different kinds of events into a box with that phrase on the label. It’s about as useful and as intellectually valid as stamp collecting. My brother lived a tightly controlled existence that, while enormously successful, was cut off from the wellsprings of life by addiction. He was living a lie, as the saying goes, and such lives are in fact fairly fragile. There is no real resilience in them.”

“What’s he addicted to?”

“My, you’re a nosy fellow.” This was said not unkindly, and Crosetti grinned.

“Guilty. It’s a bad habit. I excuse it by saying it’s because I want to plumb the depth of the human condition for my work.”

“Oh, right, you’re the screenwriter. Jake mentioned something about that. Plumb your own depths then. What do you think of Tarantino?”

“Not a plumber of depths,” said Crosetti and imitated the other man’s dismissive gesture. “What’re you doing in Europe?”

“Family business.”

“Connected to all this? I mean the paper chase, the secret manuscript…?”

“Indirectly.”

“Uh-huh. You’re a lawyer too?”

“I’m not.”

“You know, if you want to keep stuff mysterious, the way to do it is not to make cryptic comments but to adopt a fictitious and boring persona. James Bond always said he was a retired civil servant and that usually closed out the conversation. Just a tip from the world of movies.”

“Okay. I’m a Jesuit priest.”

“That works for me. I think we’re departing. We didn’t even get a safety demonstration. Is that because they don’t care or because no one can conceive of any misfortune befalling the ruling classes?”

“The latter, I think,” said Paul. “It’s hard to remain rich without developing a defect in the sympathetic imagination.”

Crosetti had never experienced a quicker takeoff. The engines strained briefly, the cabin tilted back like a La-Z-Boy, and they were above the clouds in what seemed like a few seconds.

When the plane was flying level again, Crosetti said, “I assume you know the whole story thus far. I mean about the Bracegirdle letters and the cipher and all that.”

“Well, I’ve read the letter and Jake told me a little of what you’ve learned about the nature of the cipher.”

“What do you think?”

“About our chances of interpreting it and finding this supposed lost play? Negligible. I mean we’d need the actual grille according to you, and what are the chances of a piece of perforated paper surviving for nearly four hundred years? And how would we even recognize it? And no cipher, no play—that seems fairly clear.”

“So why are you here?”

“I’m here because since this letter emerged, my brother has asked me for help for the first time in our entire lives. Twice. I want to encourage this. Jake needs a lot of help. And I owe him. He was very good to me when I was in prison and for a period afterward, although he utterly despised me. It was an act of real charity, and I want to pay him back if I can.”

“Why were you in prison?” asked Crosetti. But the other man smiled, gave a short, low laugh, shook his head, took a thick paperback out of his flight bag, and slipped on reading glasses. Curious Crosetti glommed the title: Hans Küng’s
Does God Exist?
, which struck Crosetti as an odd choice for an airplane book, but what did he know about the man? He slid his laptop out of his briefcase, placed it on the solid table provided, and turned it on. To his surprise, the little icon that announced the availability of an Internet connection lit up, but of course the sort of people who flew
in private jets could not bear to be cut off from the Internet while airborne. Cell phones probably worked too. He put the headphones on and slid a copy of
Electric Shadows
into the drive. Oh, of course, the seat had an A/C plug in too, God forbid the rich would ever have to depend on laptop batteries! He watched the movie with the usual critical discontent he felt when watching debut features by someone of his generation. And a woman, too. And a
Chinese
woman. Xiao Jiang was pretty good, and he tried to give her credit for it and not think bad thoughts about what she had done to get the chance. It was
Cinema Paradiso
against the background of the Cultural Revolution and the point seemed to be that no amount of bad art and state control could keep movies from being glamorous. The thirty-year time shifts were handled well, and the film had the typical aesthetic grace of all Chinese films, but the plot and the emotions generated by the cast seemed soap opera-ish, he thought, writing the review, a good debut from a talented director, not to be compared with Albert Crosetti, of course, who would
never
get a chance to write and direct a feature….

When the film ended he brought up the Final Cut scriptwriting word-processor and started a fresh script. It wanted a title. He typed in
Carolyn Rolly
, and thought about films named after women:
Stella Dallas. Mildred Pierce. Erin Brockovich. Annie Hall.
Yes, but…He deleted it and typed
The Bookbinder
, an original screenplay by A. P. Crosetti. A. Patrick Crosetti. Albert P. Crosetti.

Crosetti was a slow writer ordinarily, a big deleter, a pacer, a procrastinator, but now it wrote, as the silly expression went, itself. He had nearly the whole first act done, from the bookshop fire through the first night in the bookbinder’s loft, and the discovery of the manuscript, including the first flashback, a short scene from Carolyn’s childhood and its horrors. He read it over and found it good, suspiciously good, better than anything he’d done before, deep and dark and European, but with a higher tempo than the general run of serious Eurofilms. He checked his watch: nearly two hours had passed. Outside the window it was growing dark; the plane flew over a clotted field of Arctic clouds. He stretched, yawned, saved his work, and got up to visit the toilet. When he returned
he found Mishkin in his seat in what seemed like urgent conversation with his brother.

“Could you give us a moment?” asked Mishkin.

“It’s your plane, boss,” said Crosetti. He retrieved his laptop and walked forward to occupy the seat vacated by Mishkin, across the narrow aisle from Mrs. M. Or ex-Mrs., he hadn’t figured out the relationship there yet. He had to pass the two children and could not help noticing that they were both supplied with the latest Apple PowerBooks. Crosetti had never known a really rich kid and wondered what their lives were like, whether they were spoiled rotten and whether they pretended to be less rich than they were, like their daddy, or whether they were so embedded in the life that they no longer gave a damn. The girl was watching a music video, rappers living out a dream of sex and violence. The boy was shooting monsters in Warcraft. Crosetti sat down in the seat vacated by Mishkin, across the aisle from the wife-or-ex, who seemed to be sleeping, with her face pressed against the window, nothing showing but the curve of a blond head and a white neck emerging from a gray sweater. He set up his machine and plunged back into the fictive universe.

The attendant came by and delivered another glass of icy champagne and dropped a menu on his table. Apparently you could have a filet mignon cordon bleu or cold Scottish salmon or a chili dog. Crosetti went for the filet and was typing again when he became aware of a peculiar sound, like a small dog barking, no, coughing—a kind of suppressed high-pitched squeak. At first he thought it was sound leakage from one of the kids’ machines, but when he looked over at Mrs. Mishkin, he observed that the sounds were coordinated with the spasmodic jerking of her shoulder and head. She was weeping.

He said, “Excuse me, are you all right?”

She made a hand gesture that could have been “give me a moment” or “mind your own business” and then blew her nose, a surprisingly hearty honk, into a wad of tissues. She turned to face him, and his first thought was “foreigner”; Crosetti had always thought there was something vague about American faces compared with those he saw in the films of other lands, and this was an example of the difference. Mishkin’s wife had the
sort of interestingly constructed northern European face that seemed designed to glow in black-and-white cinematography. The tip of her nose and her eye rims were red, which rather spoiled the effect, but he could not help an entranced stare. It was one more indication that he had departed his real life and was now in a shooting script. She caught his stare and her hand flew to her face and hair in the eternal gesture of the woman caught out of toilette.