The Book of Air and Shadows (44 page)

“No, I don’t think you’re a drunk, or not yet, although three pints of strong English beer is a lot to drink in the middle of the day.”

“I’m a big guy,” I said, a little lamely, for it was all starting to come back, little fragments of horrid memory. I am
not
a drinker ordinarily.

The hell with this.

We got to
Darden Hall about four, under sodden skies. The surprisingly short autumn day of these latitudes was nearly gone and our headlights illuminated dark drifts of leaves on the long drive up from the road. The place had recently come into the National Trust, on the demise of the final Baron Reith in 1999, and had not yet been renovated for public view. We had called ahead to arrange a conversation with the resident conservator, a Miss Randolph.

The place was the usual crumbling pile familiar to us all from horror films and
Masterpiece Theatre
anglophiliac fantasias, although the hour and the weather gave it the look more of the former’s sort of prop. It had a Jacobean core, a couple of Georgian wings, and some Victorian gewgaws despoiling the facade. We chance to meet a workman on a tiny tractor in front of the house and he directed us around to what was once the servants’ entrance. Our knock was answered by a solid fortyish woman of the English Rose type who wore half glasses, a tweed skirt, and two cardigans, wisely in the case of these last, for the room she showed us into was almost cold enough to show breath. A tiny electric fire hummed valiantly, but clearly to little avail. It was the old steward’s office, she explained, the only habitable room in the house, and her headquarters.

She asked what she could do for us and I said, “We’re here to see Count Dracula.” She grinned and replied in an appropriately
Masterpiece Theatre-
ish accent, “Yes, everyone says that, or else something about the peasants coming for Frankenstein. Too many Gothic novels and films, but I think there’s something in all that nonsense, you know. I think that even then, in the nineteenth century, when it seemed as if the
life that produced these houses would go on forever, writers knew there was something wrong with them, that they rested ultimately on the most dreadful suffering, and it bubbled up in the Gothic tale.”

“What sort of suffering is this one built on?”

“Oh, take your pick. The original Lord Dunbarton stole it courtesy of Henry VIII from some Benedictine nuns who ran a charity hospital here. None of that for the baron, of course, and afterward the Dunbartons made their pile in sugar and slaves. That funded the Georgian buildings and afterward they had coal and gas and urban property in Nottingham and Coventry. None of them ever did an honest day’s work in their lives and they lived like emperors. But…”

“What?” Paul asked.

“It’s difficult to explain. Come with me, I’ll show you something.”

We followed her out of the office and down a dim corridor lit by wall sconces holding fifteen-watt bulbs. The chill in that room was coziness itself compared with the damp cold of the corridors, cold as the grave I recall thinking, slipping easily into Gothic mode. We went through a door and she pressed a light switch. I gasped.

“This was the Jacobean dining hall and later the breakfast room. It’s considered the finest example of linenfold walnut paneling in the Midlands, not to mention the carving on the sideboards and the inlaid parquet flooring. Look at the detail! This was done by English craftsmen for thugs who couldn’t tell a dado from sheep dip, so why did they put their souls into this walnut? Love is why, and I honor them for it, which is why I’m in the business of preserving it. Come, there’s more.”

The next room was a ballroom. “Look at the ceiling. Giacomo Quarenghi, circa 1775, Britannia ruling the waves. There she is in her amphibious chariot drawn by dolphins and all the darkies paying homage around the border. The room itself is by Adam. Look at the proportions! The windows! The parquet! No one will ever build a house like this again, ever, even though we have people in this country who could buy any of the Lords Dunbarton with the change in their pockets, and that means that something wonderful has gone out of the world, and I’d love to know why.”

“So would I,” said Paul. “I know the feeling. It’s one I often have in Rome. Corruption and vice of every sort, the ruin of real religion, and yet…what gorgeous stuff they made!”

After that, they chatted animatedly about Rome and aesthetics while I stared up at Britannia and tried to ID the subject peoples. Then we went back to the half-warm office and the business of the day. Paul did the talking, he having already established a relationship, and besides he had the collar—who cannot trust a priest? After he’d finished she said, “So you’ve come all this way because of a miscarriage of justice? You’re following the track of this Bulstrode fellow in the hope of pulling a thread that will lead you to his real killer?”

“You have it,” said Paul. “Do you recall his visit at all?”

“Oh, yes, of course I do. I don’t get many vistors with whom I can discuss anything more than the football and the price of petrol, so I’m afraid I rather seized on them and simply chatted their heads off. As I did with you, shame upon me. Yes, Professor Bulstrode, ex Brasenose, seconded to some university in the States, and he had a young woman with him, Carol Raleigh? Is that right?”

“Close enough. Do you happen to recall what they were looking for?”

The woman considered the question for a moment, staring at the coils of the electric fire. “They said they were researching the family history of the Dunbartons, but there was something else going on, I think. They were exchanging looks, if you follow me, and they were rather short on details. Scholars, I’ve found, are typically expansive on their subjects, and Professor Bulstrode and his assistant were distinctly not. But it was none of my affair after all, he had the proper scholarly credentials, and so I gave them the key to the muniment room and went on with my own affairs. They were up there for the entire day, remarkable really, because the place is a mare’s nest, never really been properly cataloged, and they descended covered in the dust of ages. I asked them if they’d found what they’d been looking for and they said yes, and thanked me and the professor made a contribution to the trust to help with the restoration, a hundred pounds, actually, very generous, and they left.”

“Did they take anything?”

“You mean make off with a document? I shouldn’t think so, but they might have taken rafts of them. I wasn’t looking, and I certainly didn’t search them before they left.”

At that point the telephone rang, and Miss Randolph picked up the heavy antique instrument and listened, and said she had to take this call, it was the builder, and they thanked her and left.

Back in the warmth of the car I asked Paul what he thought.

“My guess,” he replied, “is that they did find something and Rolly ran off with it. She seems to be quite a piece of work.”

“I suppose. Well, brother, what now? We seem to have exhausted our possibilities.”

“Yes, on this line anyway.” He looked at his watch. “Today is shot, obviously. I suggest we return to Oxford, spend the night in a perfectly adequate hotel, pick up Crosetti in the morning, and go over to Aylesbury.”

“What for? What’s in Aylesbury?”

“Springhill House, one of Her Majesty’s prisons. I want to have a talk with Leonard Pascoe, the internationally famous forger of old documents. Mr. Brown, do you think we could arrange to be followed there?”

“Yes, sir. I’m sure some wicked person might tip someone off about our destination.”

“Yes, there’s a great deal of wickedness in the world,” said Paul, with such a look of sly satisfaction on his face that I wanted to punch him.

“Oh, and Mr. Brown?” said Paul.

“Sir.”

“Would you try to locate a farm along the way? One that raises geese.”

“Geese,” said the driver. “Yes, sir.”

“What’s going on, Paul?” I asked him.

“Oh, we’re just going to meet Richard Bracegirdle,” he said, and would yield no more information, that smug bastard.

T
HE
S
IXTH
C
IPHERED
L
ETTER
(F
RAGMENT
3)

T
ap.

Crosetti stirred in his sleep and tried to return to a rather nice dream in which he was sitting around a movie set with Jodie Foster and Clark Gable, just having a comfortable conversation about the movies, and he was giving Jodie the eye because they were in on the secret about Gable not really being dead and waiting for him to explain about how he’d fooled the world but there was this rattling sound behind them and he said he’d go find out what it was….

Tap tap tap taptaptaptap

He was up, in the unfamiliar room of the Linton Lodge Hotel, on the outskirts of Oxford, a very nice room that Professor March had kindly arranged for him. It had a triple bay window giving on the garden, these windows being black with the night and also the source of the noise that had separated him from dreamland. Another rattle of pebbles hit the glass. He checked his watch: two-thirty in the morning.

Rising, he pulled on his jeans, went to the window, opened it, and got a faceful of gravel. He cursed and leaned out the window and spied a dark figure on the lawn below, stooping to retrieve another handful of pebbles from the path.

“Who the hell is that?” he demanded in the sort of loud whisper one uses when not wanting to wake a sleeping house.

The person below stood and announced in the same style, “It’s Carolyn.”

“Carolyn
Rolly
?”

“No, Crosetti, some
other
Carolyn. Get down here and let me in!”

He stared below at the white, raised, familiar face for a long moment and then shut the window, pulled on a shirt and sneakers, left the room, ran back and got his key just before the door swung shut, dashed through the short hallway, flew down the stairs and through the lounge to the garden door. He opened it, and there she was, in a long-sleeved black T-shirt and jeans, soaked through, her dark hair plastered in strings on either side of her face.

She pushed past him into the lounge.

“Christ, I’m freezing,” she said, and she seemed to be: in the dim red light of the emergency exit lamp her lips looked dark blue. She glanced at the bar. “Can you get me a drink?”

“This is closed and locked up. But I have a bottle in my room.”

He did too, a fifth of Balvenie purchased in the duty-free for his mother. When they were in the room, he turned on the hot water in the bath, handed her his old plaid bathrobe, and told her to take her wet clothes off. He poured a couple of generous shots into the hotel water glasses while she changed in the bathroom, and when she emerged, in the robe with a towel around her hair, handed her one of them.

She gulped it down, coughed, and sighed, while he stared at her face. She met his eye. “What?” she said.

“What? Carolyn, it’s the second of December, no, the third now, and you’ve been missing since, I don’t know, the end of August. Bulstrode is dead, did you know that? Someone killed him. And his lawyer shot two guys in my mom’s living room and gangsters tried to kidnap me
and…oh, Christ, I can’t begin to…Carolyn, where the
hell
have you been and what the
hell
have you been up to?”

“Don’t yell at me!” she said in a strained voice. “Please, can I just sit down and be quiet for a minute?”

He gestured to an armchair by the window and she sat on this and he sat on the bed facing her. She looked ridiculously small and young now, although there were smudges under her eyes and their blue seemed dulled, like tarnished metal.

She finished her whiskey in silence and held out her glass for a refill.

“No,” said Crosetti. “The story first.”

“From what point? My birth?”

“No, you can start with your marriage to H. Olerud of 161 Tower Road, Braddock, Pee-Ay.”

A sharp intake of breath and he saw those familiar bars of rose bloom on her cheekbones. Rolly had less control of the blush than he would have supposed necessary for such an accomplished liar.

“You know about that?” she asked.

“Yeah. I actually went out there, to the house. I had a nice conversation with Emmett.”

At this her eyes widened and she clutched her mouth. “Oh, God, you
saw
him? How is he?”

“Reasonably healthy, a little skinny maybe. He seems like a bright kid. I saw the girl too, also healthy, the bit I saw of her. Their father seems like a pretty violent guy.”

“You could say that. Harlan is fairly free with his hands.”

“I saw. How did you come to hook up with him? He seems a lot older than you.”

“He was my brother-in-law. My mom died when I was thirteen, and my sister Emily took me in. She was four years older than me and he was six years older than her.”

“What about your father?”

She uttered a short derisive laugh. “Whoever he was. Mom was a small-town waitress and barmaid and she supplemented her income by cultivating guys. Pay the rent this month and you get all the ass you can
handle. She was what they call a trucker’s friend. One of them shot her and the guy she was with at the time. I guess he thought it was true romance. I came home from middle school one day and the cops were there and I called Emily and she picked me up. This was in Mechanicsburg, and I started to live with them. Do you need to hear this?”

“Yes. So there was no Uncle Lloyd.”

“No, I lied about that. There was Harlan, though. He started messing with me when I turned fourteen and Emily didn’t do anything to stop it, he had her beat down so bad. I got pregnant with Emmett when I was sixteen and with Molly four years later and what can I say about it but that was the way I thought things were. Harlan had a job at the battery plant, there was food on the table, and that’s how we lived. I had Emily and she had me and we both had the kids. You’d be surprised how many people there are in places like Braddock who live like that. Then Harlan lost his job and had to take a shit job in a Wal-Mart warehouse and Emily died and—”

“How did Emily die?”

“She got electrocuted by the washing machine. It was always kind of sparky, and Harlan was always promising to fix it but he never did, and we had to be careful around it. I sort of think she accidentally on purpose killed herself. He was beating her pretty regular by then.”

“Uh-huh. And how does the bookbinding come into this?”

Suddenly her face turned rigid. “You want to know my whole life story? Why do you? Because we had a fuck? That entitles you to the whole fucking five-CD collection of the life of Carolyn Rolly?”

“No, Carolyn,” said Crosetti. “I’m not entitled to anything. But you came to me, in the middle of the night. Why? A warm bath? A drink of scotch? A chat about old times in the bookstore?”

“No, but…look I need your help. I ran away from them. I didn’t know where else to go. And we don’t have the time to get into every detail. When they wake up and find I’m gone they’ll come here.”

“Who’s ‘they,’ Carolyn?”

“Shvanov’s people. There are four of them, in a hotel about two miles from here. They know where you are. That’s how I knew to come here.”

“And now…what? We’re on the same side again? Why should I believe anything you say?”

“Oh, God! I told you before, I don’t know how to behave with…
real
people like you. I lie, I get into desperate panics and I run and…Christ, can’t you give me another drink? Please?”

He did. She drank. “Okay, look we don’t have time for the long version. Bookbinding—I took the kids to a doctor one day, for shots for school, and while I was waiting in the office…I saw this book. It was part of the decorations, you know? How some people have fancy bookcases with old hardcover books in them? Well, this doctor had one of those and Emmett and Molly were playing with them, taking the books down and using them like blocks and the receptionist told them they had to stop and I replaced them on the shelf and there was one of them that was called
The Bookbinder’s Art
and I swiped it. It was bound in half-calf with gold tooling. I don’t know why I took it. Maybe it was, it felt so rich, the feel of the leather and the paper, it was so
not
Braddock, like a piece of a different world that fell there by accident, right there in my hand, like a jewel. And when I got home I hid it and read it at night, every night, for months, and the idea that people could just make books by hand and they would be beautiful things…I don’t know why but it just got under my skin. And then Emily died and he started beating on
me
and I knew if I didn’t get out I’d be as dead as Emily, either he’d do it or I would, or I’d kill him. So I left. The first time, he caught me and locked me in the cellar and beat me so bad I could hardly walk. The next time I waited for his payday and I took five hundred in cash while he was sleeping and walked away and hitched a ride and ended up in New York and stayed in a shelter. I got a job cleaning buildings at night. I found my loft through that job. It was illegal and toxic, like I told you, but it was dirt cheap because the owner wanted someone on the property so scavenger gangs wouldn’t rip out the copper. That was the first time I heard Shvanov’s name.”

“Why?”

“Because he owned the building, or part of it. Able Real Estate Management. Okay, so I had a place to stay and I was a cleaner for over two years, working nights, spending all my spare time in the library
reading about bookbinding and about the book business and learning what I had to know to fake a résumé. Then I quit the cleaners and got a job in a midtown restaurant waiting tables because I needed to look at regular people, see how they dressed, how they talked, the gestures. I converted myself to a middle-class person. That took the better part of another year. And then I got the job with Glaser. My sad story. Now, do you want to hear about the manuscript?”

“I do.”

“I knew Bulstrode from before—I think I told you that in New York. Sidney introduced us, and I took a course he gave on manuscripts at Columbia General Studies. As soon as I saw the pages I took out of the Churchill I knew it was a big find.” She sipped at her drink and looked out the window at the black night. “And you want to know why I lied about owning the carcasses, why I pretended it was nothing much, and why I lied about being a fugitive so that you’d sell the pages to Bulstrode for spare change.”

“I’m all ears.”

“Okay, I’m a bookstore clerk who found a manuscript in what’s supposedly a back I bought for pennies from my employer. I have no resources and it’s going to take significant resources to get the thing authenticated and sold at auction and as soon as I go public with it Sidney is going to come out swinging and—”

“What do you mean, swinging?”

“Oh, I see you don’t know Sidney. He’s going to say that I opened the covers and found this manuscript and then swindled him into selling me the books as backs. So there’s immediately a cloud on the title and no auction house will touch it. Sidney’s a big gun in that world and I’m nobody. So I needed a front man and I thought of Bulstrode. I called him while you were waiting in the street that morning, told him what we’d found, and set up what went down in his office. He said that if it was genuine he’d give me five grand for it over and above what he gave you. So then it was Bulstrode’s manuscript. Even if he’d been fooled once, he’s still a major scholar and paleographer with access to tons of manuscript sources. There wouldn’t ever have to be a connection with me or Glaser.”

“Right, but Carolyn, I still don’t get why you didn’t tell me this off the bat.”

“Oh, for God’s sake—I didn’t
know
you. You could have mentioned it to Glaser the next day—hey, Carolyn found a priceless Jacobean manuscript in those books you sold her for junk, ha-ha. So I had to pretend to involve you in the scam without at the same time letting you know what the manuscript really was.”

“I see. And what happened afterward, that night—that was part of the scam too?”

For almost the first time that evening she looked him right in the face. Crosetti’s father had once told him that pathological liars always looked the interrogator right in the eye and kept the stare for longer than was natural, and he was happy to see that Carolyn did not do this. Her look was tentative and, he imagined, a little ashamed.

“No,” she said, “that wasn’t part of the plan. I knew you were pissed off at me, and I’d told you that porker about Uncle Lloyd and I thought you’d just walk away, and when you didn’t and you did all those nice things…look, in my whole life I
never
had a single other day like that, someone taking me places, that beautiful music, and buying me things, just because they cared about me as a person and not just because they wanted to paw me….”

“I
did
want to paw you.”

“I meant someone I wanted to get pawed by, someone my age, someone sweet. I was never a kid, never a teenager. I never hung out at the drive-in with boys. I mean, it was like drugs.”

“So, you like me?”

“Oh, I adore you,” she said, in a tone so matter-of-fact that it was more convincing than any sighing avowal. His heart actually gave a little thump. “But so what? You’re so much too good for me that it’s ridiculous, and that doesn’t even count my kids, you really need to get saddled with that mess, and so I figured, okay, just one night of…I don’t know, what you said, one night of
youth
, the kind of things regular people do when they’re our age and after that it was like the end of Cinderella, except there was no glass slipper and no prince. The next day I got together
with Bulstrode to plan out what to do next, and he said he had a source for the money he needed and we went to meet Shvanov. Did you ever see Osip Shvanov?”

“No. Only people who work for him.”

“Oh, he’s something rare. Very smooth, except around the eyes. He reminded me of Earl Ray Bridger.”

“I’m sorry…?”

“A felon my mom once went out with for a while, who I don’t want to talk about right now. Anyway, I spotted him for a bad guy right away, but poor Bulstrode didn’t have a clue, and for sure I wasn’t going to tip him off. He did his little pitch about the Shakespeare play to Shvanov. He said the Bracegirdle document itself was worth fifty to a hundred grand, but if we found the Shakespeare manuscript, there was no way to calculate how high the price would go. A hundred million? A hundred fifty? And Shvanov would risk nothing because even if we came up empty on that, he’d still have the Bracegirdle to sell. Anyway, Shvanov gave him twenty large and told him to take off for England immediately to research Bracegirdle and Lord Dumbarton and get on the trail of the play. Which he did. And I went with him—”