The Book of Air and Shadows (50 page)

They pulled into a lane, and there was the familiar Mercedes, or one just like it, and an anonymous black Ford van with two men in the front seat. Security had apparently not been breached because they drove to Biggin Hill without incident. It was cozy in the van and Crosetti, in the shotgun seat, kept drifting off. He had the lead cylinder on his lap. Brown hadn’t asked about it, or asked to see what was in it, but simply placed them both in the hands of a sweet-faced motherly woman in a blue uniform, Ms. Parr, their handling agent, and departed into his efficient anonymity.

Ms. Parr directed them to the passenger lounge, and after looking Crosetti over, asked if he would like an opportunity to freshen up, to which he responded that he would like a shower and a change of clothes if it could be arranged, and it needless to say could be arranged, as what could not be arranged for the fliers in private jets? And how about two large padded envelopes and some packing tape? These appeared, and Crosetti went into the men’s room with them and his carry-on bag and the most valuable portable object on the planet in its lead casing. Alone in the blue-tiled room, he removed the play and sealed it in one of the envelopes and taped this under the lining of the back of his corduroy sports jacket. This he hung on one of the shower hooks, outside the plastic curtain, then stripped and took a shower, and was amazed at the almost Mississippian quantities of silt that flowed off his body and down the drain. While he showered he considered why he didn’t just leave the
damned thing with Carolyn and why he was, in effect, concealing it from her.

Because you don’t trust her, came the answer from Rational Albert. But I love her and she loves me, replied Amorous Al. She said so. But Crosetti realized that part of the woman’s appeal was her utter weirdness, the proven fact that she might do anything. Even at this moment he had no guarantee that when he emerged from this bathroom she might not be gone and that he might never see her again. This thought prompted an acceleration in his toilette. Five minutes later, still damp but neatly dressed in the jacket, black jeans, and a flannel shirt, he emerged into the lounge, holding his carry-on (containing Bracegirdle’s lead pipe) and a padded envelope, which he had stuffed with flyers for tourist spots and sealed with tape. Carolyn was seated in the lounge. She had taken a shower and changed her clothes too, and her damp hair seemed darker than it had been.

He sat down next to her. “One more flight,” he said, “and this adventure is over.”

“I hope so,” she said. “I hate adventure. I want to be in a place where I can get up in the morning and see the same people and do pretty much the same thing every day.”

“Bookbinding.”

“Yes. I know you think it’s boring. I know you think that making movies is serious art and making books is like…I don’t know, knitting afghans. I don’t care. That’s going to be my life. I’m going to get my children and go to Germany, where I can study bookbinding, and I’m going to do nothing else but study bookbinding, and make books. That’ll be my life.”

“And what, I’ll come visit in the summer?”

She turned her head and made that pushing gesture with her hands. “Not now, Crosetti. I can’t hold any more
stuff
in me. Could we just, like,
be
together for the next couple of hours without devising contractual long-range plans?”

“Sure, Carolyn. Whatever you say,” he said, and thought, That’s what’d be printed on the outside of the package if our relationship was a
product, like contents poisonous or highly inflammable. Whatever you say.

He walked a little distance away and called Mishkin in New York. Mishkin took the news in and said congratulations and that he’d have a car meet them at the airport.

Their plane was
a Citation X this time, smaller and sleeker even than the Gulfstream, configured for six, with a closed-off partition in the rear where there were two bedlike lounges. Seeing these, Crosetti was about to suggest that here was an unusually comfortable way for the two of them to join the Eight Mile High Club but did not. The vibrations were wrong, as they so often were around Carolyn Rolly. He sighed, belted himself in, drank his champagne. The aircraft screamed, slammed him back in his seat, shot into the air at an aggressive angle. He felt the Most Valuable Portable Object crinkle against his spine. The envelope with the decoy ms. was lying on the seat next to him. He read a magazine for a while and then pulled his blanket around him and over his head. It was not the skimpy towel the commercial airlines gave you but a thick, full-size thing as used by the best hotels. He adjusted his seat to near horizontal and fell into exhausted sleep.

And awoke to the sound of clinking dinnerware and a delightful odor of cookery. The flight attendant was about to serve a meal. Crosetti sat up, adjusted his seat, and looked across the aisle. Carolyn was in the lavatory. He examined the padded envelope he had left on the seat. The tape was untouched, but careful inspection showed that one of the bottom corners of the envelope had been carefully pried apart and skillfully resealed by someone for whom neither paper nor glue held any secrets. He sniffed the edge and detected a faint acetone pong. She’d used nail-polish remover to relax the glue and then resealed it after, obviously, finding that the envelope was a decoy. He wondered what she would have done with the real thing, and what she thought when she discovered that he had created a decoy and left it out in plain view. Who could he have been trying to decoy but her? Oh, Carolyn!

But he kept his mien agreeable when she returned, and they had a stiff little heartbreaking meal together, after which she went back to her seat. He watched
The Maltese Falcon
, memorizing yet more of the script, and as he watched he very much wished that she would ask him what he was watching, and he could invite her to watch it with him, and he would see if the character of Brigid O’Shaughnessy caught her conscience. But he feared another rejection more than he wanted to find out; in fact, he decided that he didn’t want to find out at all.

At JFK they passed together through customs and immigration and when they left the terminal proper there was a dark-skinned man with a sign that read croseti standing in the exit lobby; and as soon as she saw it, Carolyn touched his arm and said, “Oh, gosh, I forgot something back in the customs shed.”

“What did you forget, Carolyn? You just have that little bag.”

“No, something I bought. I’ll be right back.”

She whipped back through the doors and was gone. Crosetti went up to the man with the sign and introduced himself and the man said that he was Omar and worked for Mr. Mishkin, and had been instructed to drive Mr. Crosetti and Ms. Rolly to Mr. Mishkin’s residence. They waited there, with people rushing and brushing by them for half an hour and then Crosetti went back into the terminal and looked around, quite hopelessly, and returned and drove with the man Omar into Manhattan, slowly through the clotted traffic of the morning rush. Crosetti was not thinking at all clearly, the combination of jet lag and exhaustion both physical and emotional having reduced his brain to a barely sentient sludge, and so it was a good forty-five minutes (the limo then a quarter mile from the Midtown Tunnel) before he remembered to call his mother.

“Albert, you found it!”

“Mom, how did you…?”

“Your friend was just here and told us the whole story.”

“Just here?”

“Yes. She came in a cab, hugged her kids for about ten minutes, and left in the same cab.”

“What? She didn’t take the kids?”

“No, she said she had some business to do first and promised that she’d send for them in a couple of days. Really, Albert, I mean they’re perfectly nice kids but I hope you don’t make a habit of—”

“Did you get the cab number?” Crosetti asked.

“I certainly did not. Why, were you thinking of asking Patsy to run a trace on the ride?”

“No,” Crosetti lied weakly.

“Yes, you were, and you should be ashamed of yourself. That’s dangerously near stalking, darling, and I mean she’s a charming enough woman but it’s also clear that she wants to pursue her own life and that it doesn’t include you.”

Perfectly true, but not something a man needs to hear from his mother. Crosetti broke off the conversation with unnecessary gruffness and tried not to think of Carolyn Rolly for the remainder of the trip to Mishkin’s place and failed.

Crosetti had one friend who had made it big directing commercials, and this friend had a classy SoHo loft, although nothing like the loft that Jake Mishkin had. He commented on this and observed, “I guess I should’ve gone to law school.”

“Perhaps,” said his host, “but I don’t think you have the proper parasitic mouth parts. I believe you’re unfortunately a creator and doomed to support a great pyramid of people like me. Speaking of creators, where is it?”

Crosetti took off his jacket and pulled out the envelope. Mishkin went to a long refectory table and carefully laid out each page, making two rows of eleven.

They both stared at the pages for a while in silence, which Mishkin broke with, “That’s really remarkable. It looks like it was written last week.”

“They were sealed in this,” said Crosetti and took the cylinder from his bag. “It was air and water tight, so hardly any decay or oxidation. Bracegirdle did a good job.”

“Yes. Who knows that you found the play?”

“Well, there are three people over in England who know we found something, but not necessarily what, then there’s me and Carolyn and my mom and I guess Klim.”

“And where is Carolyn?”

“I don’t know. She bolted at the airport, dropped by my mother’s house to see her kids, and left.”

“Good Lord! Why would she do a thing like that?”

Crosetti drew a deep breath. Now that he had to actually say it he felt his throat constrict around the words. “I think she’s going to Shvanov, to let him know what we found.”

“Shvanov? What the hell does she have to do with Shvanov?”

Crosetti gave him a short version of what Carolyn had told him in the Oxford hotel room the night she had come tapping upon his window. Mishkin seemed stunned by this revelation. “You mean she’s been Shvanov’s agent all this time?”

“In a way, although I think Carolyn is pretty much always working for Carolyn. But my sense is they have a relationship too.”

“As do you, I presume.”

“Yeah. I thought we were pretty close, but who knows? Have you heard anything about your kids?”

“No. I have a number to call when I have what they want.”

“Which you now have. Are you going to call them? Obviously, Shvanov is going to find out pretty soon if he hasn’t already.”

“Yes, but I’m not sure it’s Shvanov who has the children.”

“Who else could it be?”

“As I said, I’m not sure, but I’ve thought for some time that there are other players involved.” Mishkin picked up the title page and stared at it, as if the ability to read the strange handwriting might thereby flow into his head.

Crosetti said, “You don’t seem very concerned.”

“Oh, I’m concerned. I’m just not frantic.” He turned and faced Crosetti. “You probably don’t think I’m a very good father. I would agree: I’m not. I wasn’t trained by my own father, which I understand is required. How about you, Crosetti? Did you have a good father?”

“Yeah, I did. I thought he was the greatest man on the planet.”

“Lucky you. Deceased, I understand.”

“Yeah. He was driving down the street, coming home from the office, when he spotted a couple of cops chasing a mutt. He got out of the car and joined in and he popped an artery. DOA. I was twelve.”

“Yes. Well, this seems to conclude our business. We didn’t discuss payment for your time. What would you consider fair?”

Crosetti suddenly wanted to get far away from this man and far from the tangled plot he represented. He couldn’t help thinking that Carolyn had a point about the exciting life. The right movie line would have been “You don’t owe me anything,” followed by a slamming exit, but what Crosetti said in real life was, “How about a round ten grand now, and another forty if it proves out?”

Mishkin nodded. “I’ll send you a check.”

I
t's snowing now, a heavy wet snow such as they get in the Northeast when the temperature is just cold enough for snow to form. I am back at the keyboard after a bracing trip in the chill. I visited the boathouse again and checked out the old mahogany speedboat. It is a seventeen-foot 1947 Chris-Craft Deluxe Runabout, with a ninety-five horsepower six, and it looks in mint condition. I filled its tank from a fifty-five-gallon gasoline drum with a hand pump on it. The key was in the ignition and I started it up. After a little coughing it roared nicely and filled the boathouse with a pungent cloud of blue smoke. The other thing I did was to stow my pistol under the cushion of the driver's seat. Do I have a plan? Not really. I am preparing for various contingencies. If you are expecting a visit from a number of armed men and you have a weapon yourself, you can either start shooting as soon as they arrive, since if you don't they will come in and take it away from you, or you can hide the thing and hope you can get to it at need. I was not prepared for a firefight with
an unknown number of bad guys and so that is what I did. I wonder whether the snow will interfere with my visitors.

To return to this account (and I expect it will be closing soon, as time past rushes toward its rendezvous with time present): after I spoke with Crosetti in Zurich there passed some days of waiting, a dead period, as I had nothing to occupy my time. I really can’t recall what I did except I called Amalie several times a day, to reassure her that things were actually going quite well and to inquire whether she had heard from the kidnappers. Yes, she had. Each morning a video would arrive by e-mail showing an apparently unstressed Niko and Imogen, the latter smiling as at a secret joke, with a copy of that day’s paper, and the message spoken by both of them, always the same: “Hi, Mommy, we’re fine, don’t worry, see you soon.” Fade to black. No warnings, no threats, no clue as to where they were being held or by whom. Beyond that there was nothing for us to talk about, and I believe both of us were happy to break the connection.

Then the call from Crosetti that they actually had the thing and a further day of waiting, during which I left at least six messages with my brother and with my sister. My sister never replied, but late that night my brother called me.

I asked him where he was and he said he was in Zurich with Amalie and updated me on the status of his plan. He said a package would arrive at my house by air express the following morning which would give me what I needed, and I asked him again if he had identified the other players in this game, the ones besides Shvanov, and he said he had not, but his sense was that they were heavily connected to the people who did big-time art heists in Europe, not the kind who stole to sell or to ransom but the ones who supplied very rich immoral people with the odd Titian or Rembrandt for private contemplation. I said that I thought that those people were concocted by writers of cheap fictions and he assured me that they were not, that sinister forces were definitely involved in the affair and that his plan was the only way he could think of to extricate us all from their grip. I sensed that he was hiding something from me but
I had no leverage on him then to make him come clean, or perhaps it was my native paranoia with respect to my family.

The next day I received an international FedEx package from Paul, and somewhat later Omar called from the airport saying that Crosetti was off the plane. An hour later Crosetti walked into my loft and handed it over. Of course, I had given Omar, who was armed, instructions to watch the man like a hawk from the second he left the customs shed, but still…I’m not sure I could have done it myself, turning over something he believed was worth tens of millions at least, of uncertain ownership, to rescue two kids he barely knew. A decent man, clearly, and a reproach to all my kind, and I think it speaks badly of me that I could not like him. Like many of his type, he was also something of a schmuck—this Carolyn Rolly apparently had put him through the wringer, and I was not entirely surprised to learn that she was and had always been an agent of Shvanov. I suppose I should have asked him if he had heard anything of Miranda, but I decided that the fewer people who knew about my continuing interest in her the better. In any case, we were not best buddies. He made his feelings about me quite clear as well, and we completed our business quickly.

Shortly after Crosetti left, my phone rang and it was Shvanov. He congratulated me on having recovered a great cultural treasure and told me he would be by shortly to pick it up. I inquired about my missing children. A considerable pause on the line and then he said, “Jake, you are always accusing me of kidnapping people from your life and I have told you sincerely that I do not do such things. This is now becoming boring, you know?”

“Nevertheless, Osip, you see that I can’t release the manuscript to you, as that is what the kidnappers demand for the return of my children. If you don’t have them.”

He said, “Jake, believe me, you have my greatest sympathy and I would be happy to help you in any way, but that does not affect our business relationship. That manuscript was located through means of Professor Bulstrode’s information, which is my property, and so the manuscript is also my property.”

“I think you would have a hard time with that argument in a court of law.”

Another longish pause and then in a voice some decibels quieter he said, “And are you going to take me to court, Jake?” Here a mirthless chuckle. “Maybe I should take
you
to court.”

“Well, we do have the rule of law in this country, or did. Unlike your own homeland. In any case I will not—”

“But, Jake, listen to me: you will do this. You will give it.”

“Or what? You’ll outsource some persuasion?”

“No,” said Shvanov, so quietly that I had to strain to hear him. “I believe I will handle this in-house.”

After this unsatisfactory
conversation I was rather at a loss as to what to do next. I suppose I had regressed in a way to the period just after my mother’s suicide, when I was entirely alone, the main difference being that now I had plenty of money. They say that love will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no love, but this is only partially true, I have found. I had Omar come over with his little machine pistol and I set him to guard the manuscript. He loves this kind of stuff and is full of little ploys to determine how different players in a conspiracy have been compromised and how to communicate that fact by unobtrusive signals. After that I went out for a walk and maybe a drink and lunch at a place I frequent on West Broadway. Walking alone always helps to clear my head.

Although lower Manhattan has of late become a bustling collection of boutiques, it is still possible, particularly on a weekday and in cold weather, to be quite alone on many of its streets. I was walking east on Franklin when one of those awful white Cadillac stretch limos with smoked windows glided past me, pulled to the curb in front of me, and stopped. The curbside door popped open and a large man emerged and opened the rear door. He gestured to the opening. I made to walk around him but he moved lightly into my path and drew a long-barreled .22 semiautomatic from the side pocket of his leather car coat and used that
to gesture more forcefully. My brother says you should always pay attention to people carrying pistols of this type because the little gun is an advertisement for the ability of the person holding it to shoot you very accurately, through the eye, for example, if need be, and he can also blow your toe off if you don’t do what he says. The man’s face was intelligent and its expression was the slightly bored but efficient look of the professional doorman. He had the large, merciless brown eyes of a seal. I immediately sensed that I was dealing with a higher order of thug than I had heretofore. I got into the car.

These vehicles can be variously configured, but this one had a typical layout. There was the driver’s seat of course, and behind it two regular bench seats for the lesser entourage, here occupied by a couple of well-tanned fellows with good haircuts and the typical wiseguy expression of confident viciousness on their faces. In the rear, where there are doors only on the curb side, there was a kind of semicircular banquette, with the bar and stereo and TV positioned so that the big shot, who sits in the rearmost part of this sofa, has them at his or her disposal. I slid in, the gunman slid in beside me, and I sat down across from the big shot.

“Where are they?” I said.

“That’s a fine way to greet your father,” he replied. “‘Where are they?’ No, ‘how are you, Dad, glad to see you?’”

“You kidnapped my children, your own grandchildren, and you expect filial affection?”

He made a sour face and his hand flapped a familiar go-away gesture. “What’re you talking ‘kidnap’? I’m their
zaideh
, can’t I take them on a little trip.”

“Without telling their parents where they are?”

“I sent her a nice video every day. You saw them? Did they look fucking kidnapped to you? Believe me, they’re both having the time of their life.”

Oh, it all came back in a rush and I sat there gaping in frustration, as I had gaped as a boy at the ingenious rationalizations he spun out so easily to his wife and children. The very structures of reality had shimmered and dissolved under the flow of his words, and we’d always ended up
thinking that somehow
we
were in the wrong. Decent people who have read this document thus far would be justified in thinking me a conscienceless, selfish piece of shit, but here sat my master. In that miserable department I couldn’t tie his shoes. A life of perfect egoism had done him good, however, and at eighty years old he looked ten years younger. He’d had implants and maybe a little work around the eyes, and his face had that leathery tan you see on rich old guys. He seemed strong enough for at least another decade of corruption.

“So where are they having this super time?” I asked, in a voice I hardly recognized as my own, my throat constricted, my head pounding, my vision going red around the edges. I heard in my ears the sound of gritting teeth. Had I not feared a bullet through the elbow I would have ripped his head off right there.

“They’re here, in an apartment belongs to a friend of mine up on the East Side. Miriam’s with them.”

Of course. That’s why a savvy city kid like Imogen had walked without a fuss into a strange car in Zurich: the occupant had been no stranger, but her beloved Aunt Miri.

“Then I’d like to see them,” I said.

“Not a problem. You’ll go get the manuscript, we’ll take a drive, we’ll see the kids, everything’ll be fine.”

“And if not, what? They’ll stop having the time of their life? You’ll cut off pieces?”

He sighed dramatically and said a brief something in a language I didn’t know, but which I supposed was Hebrew. The thugs laughed. To me he said, “Don’t be stupid. I’m not going to hurt anyone. But you are going to get me that manuscript, and you know it, so why fuck around?”

“What about Shvanov? He thinks it belongs to him.”

Again the hand waggle. “Shvanov is a putz. He’s a small-time loan shark with fucking delusions of grandeur.” He raised his voice and called out to the driver, “Misha, let’s go.”

The car moved smoothly away from the curb.

“Where’re we going?” I asked.

“To your place, to get the thing, where’d you think?”

“No,” I said.

“No? What do you mean, no?”

“Just what I said. Why should I give it to you? And how the hell did you get involved in this at all?”

He rolled his eyes and sat back in the cushioned seat, with his hands laced across his belly and his dark eyes (mine!) regarding me with the amused contempt I recalled as being their almost perpetual expression during my childhood. “Jake, your problem is you got my kisser and your mother’s brains. That wasn’t the good combo.”

“Fuck you!”

“An example—you’re sitting in a car with three guys who’d rip your eyeballs out with their thumbs as easy as they’d pick their nose and you’re using language? To me? But since you’re family I’m not going to get mad, I’m going to explain to you the situation here. Okay, I’m in Tel Aviv, I’m semiretired but I still keep an interest, a nice deal comes along I might go in on it. I have a lot of connections. So Shvanov—he’s in Israel three, four months ago and he’s talking big, he’s got a line on the treasure of the ages but he won’t say what it is, and people are thinking he’s on to some gold, some art, because he’s talking to people who handle that kind of thing. I’m curious, and the next time I see Miriam I ask her what her pal Osip is up to and she tells me about Shvanov and this Bulstrode character and the Shakespeare manuscript. Of course, by that time Bulstrode’s dead—why, I never figured out…”

“Shvanov thought he brought it back from England and was holding out.”

“Okay, that’s the problem with Shvanov right there,” said Izzy, “he’s too quick with his hands, he doesn’t think it through, and so he goes and kills the one guy with the best line on this thing. Anyway, after that, Miriam tells me you’re involved, you have these papers that point the way to the thing, so I talk to some people and we set up a little syndicate, start an operation to keep an eye on you and Shvanov and see if we can get our hands on this. And then it starts to look like you and this guinea, what’s-his-face…”

“Crosetti.”

“Yeah, him: it looks like you’ve got the best leads on it, so we start to follow you…”

“So it was you and not Shvanov’s, who mugged me in front of my apartment and broke into Crosetti’s house and made me kill two people?”

He shrugged. “Someone associated with the syndicate set that up, and I have to say, you buy cheap, you get cheap. The fuckin city’s full of Russian patzers don’t know their ass from a hole in the ground. These boys here, on the other hand, are a whole different proposition, in case you get any ideas.”

“But before that you sent someone to pretend to be Bulstrode’s niece and she stole the manuscript I got from Bulstrode.”

“I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”