The Book of Air and Shadows (43 page)

After some small talk, March said, “Well, secret meetings. It all seems so odd: when did you last see your father and all that…”

At this I started and looked wildly at Paul, who explained that it was a famous painting of a Cavalier boy being questioned by Roundhead soldiers, a figure of speech. The professor continued. “Yes, quite: and I would not have agreed to meet with you in such an inconvenient place were it not for your suggestion, Father Mishkin, that the police explanation of Andrew’s death was not accurate.”

This was the first I had heard of Paul’s involvement in the Bulstrode case and I listened with interest as he explained. “No it’s not. They found a doped-up rent boy named Chico Garza using your friend’s credit card and muscled a confession out of him. The boy had nothing to do with Andrew’s death.”

“On what evidence?”

“Well, first, I visited the boy in jail. He was sleeping in a squat at the time of the murder and he woke up with Andrew’s wallet in his bag. He never met Andrew Bulstrode, but he was carefully framed for the killing. The police found forensic traces of Garza in Andrew’s apartment, so it was well prepared. The other, and more compelling, reason is that no one outside of my brother and his secretary knew that Andrew had deposited the Bracegirdle papers with the law firm, yet within days of the murder, Russian thugs were shadowing him. How did they know? They must have extracted that information from your friend.”

The word “extracted” hung in the air, and March briefly shut his eyes. What I was thinking at that moment was this: Shvanov had mentioned “sources” when he told me how he had come to take an interest in me and I hadn’t pressed him on it. Of course, gangsters have “sources.”
People tell them things, or they have people followed. Or maybe Shvanov was lying, maybe he was the torturer…

(Again, in hindsight, at an emotionless remove, things are marvelously clear, but in the instant of occurrence they are covered in layers of fog. And we are so good at denying what is before our eyes, as for example, the vignettes of Mutti and me that Paul had provided on the plane, and which I have, from that moment to this, thought about on a daily basis. So you must not blame me for not coming up with what became so obvious later.)

A barmaid came in at this point, not the sort of barmaid such an inn should have had, a jolly pink blonde in a peasant blouse and a canvas apron, but a thin, dark, dour girl in an olive pantsuit, a Maltese or Corsican perhaps, who took our drink and food orders and departed without any Falstaffian badinage at all. March now said, “I fail to see how Andrew could have got himself mixed up with Russian gangsters. I mean it just boggles the mind.”

“He needed money to finance the validation of the manuscript,” I said, “and if found valid, for locating the manuscript play Bracegirdle mentioned.”

“Excuse me…Bracegirdle?” said March, and the three of us gaped at him in surprise. Crosetti blurted out, “Didn’t Andrew tell you
anything
about why he came to England last summer?”

“Only that he was doing some research. But he was always on to some research or other. Who is Bracegirdle?”

I gave him the short version, and while I was doing this the barmaid came in with our food and drink. I had ordered a pint of bitter and finished it in time to flag the girl for another. March listened carefully, asking few questions. When I was done, he shook his head ruefully. “Andrew and I have been together more or less continuously for nearly thirty years,” he said, “and we’ve always been reasonably open about what’s going on in our lives—open for dons, I mean, not actual gushing or anything like that—but I must say that I had not the slightest clue about any of this. Andrew could keep things dark, of course, especially
after the bloody catastrophe he went through, but still…and this doesn’t answer the original question at all. Why, if he needed funding, did he not come to me?”

“Are you particularly wealthy?” I asked.

“Oh, not at all, but I do have some assets, some property, some inherited things. I suppose at a pinch I could have raised a hundred or so without descending into absolute beggary. Would you say he would have needed much more than that?”

“If you’re talking about a hundred thousand pounds, then no. We have no indication that what he got was more than about twenty thousand dollars from the Russians.”

“Good Lord! Then it makes even less sense. Why didn’t he come to me?”

I said, “Perhaps he was embarrassed because of the scandal,” and mentioned that Mickey Haas had asked the same question. As soon as the name was out I was surprised to see a sour expression appear on March’s refined face.

“Well, of course he wouldn’t have approached Haas,” he said. “Haas hated him.”

“What! How can you say that?” I objected. “They were friends. Mickey was one of the few people in academia who stuck up for him when the fake quarto scandal broke. He gave him a place to work at Columbia when no one else would look at him.”

“I take it Haas is a particular friend of yours,” said March.

“Yes, he is. He’s my oldest friend and one of the most decent and generous people I know. Why did Andrew imagine that Mickey hated him?”

“It had nothing to do with imagination,” snapped March. “Look here, twenty odd years ago, Haas produced a book on Shakespeare’s women, female characters in the plays, that is, the point of which was that thinking about Shakespeare as an original genius simply reinforced the toxic individualism of bourgeois culture. I believe he said that
Macbeth
was really all about the three witches, and a load of similar twaddle. Andrew was asked to review it for the
Times Literary Supplement
and
gave it the mighty bollocking it deserved, not only poking holes in its logic and scholarship, but also implying that Haas knew better, on the evidence of his own earlier writing, and that he had produced this farrago merely to curry favor with the Marxists and feminists and whatnot who control, I am informed, all hiring at American universities. Not that I know a thing about it myself, barely passed my A-levels in the damned stuff, just a simple biologist really. Amazing that Andrew and I got on so well together; absence of rivalry perhaps, two halves making a whole. He used to read me bits in the evenings. Well, it was a great scandal, outraged letters back and forth to the
TLS
, screeds in the little journals, and I recall thinking at the time how happy I was to be in a business where you have actual data. It blew over, as these things always do, and when Andrew lost his reputation because of that awful little man, Haas was there with a stout defense, and later a job offer. As I recall, neither of us mentioned the earlier dogfight. We assumed that it had been forgotten, simply part of the usual give-and-take of academic debate. But it hadn’t been. Almost as soon as Andrew arrived in New York, Haas began to torment him. At first it was just sly digs, little things that could have been confused with some kind of bumptious American humor, but then it grew worse, petty acts of tyranny…”

“Such as?”

“Oh, he was promised a Shakespeare seminar, and some graduate courses, but instead he was given freshman composition sections, rather like a brain surgeon being asked to tidy up the wards, mop up the blood, and empty the pans. When he complained of this outrageous treatment, Haas told him he was lucky to have anything at all, he was lucky not to be on the dole, or selling watches on the street. Andrew called and told me about this gruesome business, and of course I demanded that he tell Haas what he could do with his bloody appointment and come straight home. But that he would not do. I think he felt it was a kind of expiation for his scholarly sin. And…you know I see that this will sound odd, as if Andrew were descending into some hell of paranoia, but he told me that he believed Haas was tormenting him in more underhanded ways as well. His salary cheques would go missing. Little items would vanish
from his briefcase, from his room. Someone changed the lock on his office door. One day he came to work and found all his things in the hall. He’d had his office moved without notice. Classes he was meant to meet in one room were mysteriously scheduled for another room on the other side of the campus, and he had to rush to meet them in the heat of the summer. Those terrible New York summers, and he suffered so from the heat. Not used to it, you see, being from here. And his air-conditioning was always breaking down….”

“Did he blame Mickey for that too?” I asked unkindly.

“Yes, I see where you’re going and I confess I thought that as well. Is he running mad? But it was the weight of evidence, you see, I mean the accumulation of horrible details—could he possibly have made them up? Unlikely, in my opinion: poor Andrew wasn’t a fantasist, not in the least. We used to joke that he had no imagination at all, and then there’s what I saw when he returned last August.”

He paused here and drank some of his beer. His eyes looked wet to me, and I fervently wished for him not to break down about poor Andrew. I took on some of my own pint, my third.

“It’s difficult to describe. Manic and frightened at the same time. He had a young woman with him and insisted she had to stay in our house, although there are some perfectly adequate hotels nearby.”

“Carolyn Rolly,” said Crosetti.

“Yes, I believe that was her name. She was helping him in some research….”

“Did he say what the research was?” Paul asked.

“Not really, no. But he said it was the most important find in the whole history of Shakespeare scholarship, and dreadfully hush-hush. As if I would blab. In any case they were out and about. He seemed to have plenty of ready money, renting a car, staying away for days, returning in a mood of exhilaration. One thing he did say, that he was authenticating the antiquity of a manuscript and couldn’t be seen to be doing so. That was the main reason for Miss Rolly tagging along. From what I could gather, they did authenticate it by technical means and then they were off to Warwickshire.”

“Where in Warwickshire, do you know?” I asked.

“Yes, I happened upon some papers Miss Rolly left behind that suggested they had visited Darden Hall. Andrew returned alone, and he seemed much deflated and more frightened. I asked him about Miss Rolly, but he put me off. She was ‘away’ doing research. I didn’t believe him for a moment—I thought perhaps they’d had some sort of falling-out. In any case, as I say, he was a changed man. He insisted on having all the curtains drawn and he would stalk the house at night, holding a poker and shining a torch in dark corners. I begged him to tell me what the problem was, but he said I was better off not knowing.”

Crosetti pressed March on what had become of Rolly. Did he think she had gone back to the States when Bulstrode had? He didn’t know, and that was more or less the end of our interview. After assuring the don that we would have all of Bulstrode’s personal items delivered to him and that Ms. Ping would handle the decedent’s will (and of course avoiding the issue of the lost manuscript), we took our leave.

Back in the car, we had a small disagreement about what to do next. Paul thought that we should continue with our original plan of following Bulstrode’s tracks, which meant going to Warwickshire and visiting Darden Hall. Crosetti objected that Bulstrode did not seem to have found anything there and why did we think we’d do any better than an expert? He was for staying and investigating at March and Bulstrode’s home and looking at these “papers” March had mentioned. I observed that he seemed far more interested in finding Ms. Rolly than in locating the Item. He replied that Rolly was the source, key, and engine of the entire affair. Find Rolly and you had all currently available information about the Item, including in all probability the purloined grille. We tossed this bone back and forth for some minutes, with increasing irritation on my part (for, naturally, I knew it was
Miranda
who had stolen the grille!) until Brown reminded us that other agents would be cruising these roads and asking the locals whether anyone had seen a Mercedes SEL, of which there were probably not many on the lanes of rural Oxfordshire, and by such means arriving back on our heels.

Paul suggested that Crosetti return to the inn and ask if March
would consent to an inspection of these papers; he could stay at one of the perfectly adequate hotels. March was not averse to this plan, and we left Crosetti there with him. I was relieved, for I’d been finding the man ever more annoying. I mentioned this to Paul as Brown drove us away from the pub and he asked me why that was, since Crosetti struck him as mild enough. He’d hardly said a word in the car during the journey north.

“I don’t like him,” I said. “A typical poseur from the outer boroughs. A
screenwriter
, for God’s sake! Completely untrustworthy. I can’t imagine what I was thinking when I invited him along.”

“You should pay attention to the people who irritate you,” said Paul.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Oh, I think you know,” he said in that irritatingly confident tone he sometimes has, like a voice from the clouds.

“I
don’t
know. I would have said if I knew, or have you been vouchsafed the power to read minds?”

“Hm. Can you think of another poseur from the outer boroughs, this one an actor rather than a screenwriter? But this one didn’t have a family as happy as Crosetti’s, didn’t have a loving mom, didn’t have a heroic dad—”

“What, you think I’m
jealous
of him? That I’m
like
him?”

“—who decided to play it safe and go to law school instead of taking a shot at what he really wanted to do, and he sees a kid with a warm and loving family who has the guts to follow his dreams—”

“That is such horseshit….”

“Not. Plus, you practically accused him of trying to seduce your wife, in fact, you encouraged him to do so. Just before you wrecked the bar in your hotel and put the bartender in the hospital.”

“I did no such thing,” I said spontaneously.

“I know you think you didn’t, but you really did. Have you ever had blackouts like that before?”

“Oh, thank you! I’m sure you have an AA group in your church basement that I’d fit right into.”