The Book of Air and Shadows (7 page)

I love my children as much as I love anything, which I have to say is not all that much. I am able to maintain the simulacrum of a good father simply as an act of imagination, as previously I maintained that of a good son, a good brother, a friend, and so on. It is more easy than you might think to fool people, and until I met Amalie I thought everyone was like that, I thought people picked a script from a cultural box and played it out, I thought that, really, there was no difference between Jake Mishkin playing Mercutio and Jake Mishkin playing Jake Mishkin, except that Mercutio was better written.

That was, by the way, why I didn’t go into acting professionally. I told myself that I gave up the theater (and what a gross self-pitying phrase that sounds!) because I required a sure source of income to support my family, but in fact it was because once I got into a part it was nearly impossible for me to get out of it. What was funny-eccentric in high school became
funny-peculiar when I got a little older, and then not funny at all. I imagined myself spending my days in a locked ward, stuck in Macbeth or Torvald Helmer. Or Estragon. And there was also, I don’t know, something seriously toxic about the people who were involved with theater, or maybe I just projected that because I was scared. So I switched to prelaw and have had little reason to regret it since. I don’t go to plays.

I’ve returned after
a break to drink some coffee and have a doughnut. I bought two dozen at a place in Saranac Lake and have been living off them and coffee for some time. The house is well stocked with canned goods and staples, some of them of considerable age, and there is a freezer with fish and game in it. Mickey said I could stay here indefinitely, although he added that in the event of a nuclear attack I would have to share it with him and whichever of his three wives he decides to bring along. There is a town twenty-six miles off, New Weimar, but I have not visited it. I thought it best if no one local knew I was here. The house is quite isolated, standing at the end of a long dirt driveway that comes off a gravel road, that diverges from a secondary state road that comes off Route 30 west of Saranac Lake. The isolation is purely physical, however, for some years ago Mickey installed a satellite dish, and so you can get the usual two hundred channels, and more significantly there is broadband Internet access via the dish. I like to feel that with a few button pushes I can send this out to the whole world. This may be a bargaining chip at some point, with whom I don’t yet know.

Reading this over I see I have screwed up the line of the narrative beyond all repair. It might have been better had I simply set out to write out my life story straight up, as if, like Bracegirdle, I were on my deathbed, instead of merely dwelling in the probability of meeting some violent end in the not-too-distant future. Death, I suppose, concentrates the mind, assuming one has a mind left. The problem is that I started out to tell a simple story like you used to find in cheap thrillers, the electronic equivalent of the last-gasp message, the cryptic scrawl on the plaster, the note in blood—“
the emeralds are in the p
[illegible scrawl]”; or “
It wasn’t Har
.”
And from this arises the plot. But it seems that my life has become mixed up with the story, as was Bracegirdle’s, viz.:

So saith Bracegirdle and so say I.

To take up the tale then, I see by my diary that the next two days passed without significant incident, as did the weekend, blank except for a lone “Ingrid,” which meant I must have gone up to Tarrytown for dinner drinks a brace of reasonably satisfying acts of sexual intercourse breakfast and bye-bye Ingrid.

No, this slights a very nice woman, a choreographer, whom I met at a music company gala, and whom I caused to fall for me by being courteous, sympathetic, generous, and large. She is not the first, was not the last, to make this misstep. I don’t know what’s wrong with men nowadays, but the isle of Manhattan seems to be full of attractive, classy, sexy women between thirty and fifty years of age, both married and single, who find it nearly impossible to get laid. I do my best, but it is a sad business. Let me not enter into all that now.

On the Monday, we had our usual partners’ meeting in the morning and afterward, as I usually do, I called my driver and went to the gym. I noted above that I live a fairly simple life, no expensive hobbies, etc., but I suppose that having a driver perpetually on call might be counted an extravagance. With the car, it costs me a little shy of fifty grand a year, but on the other hand much of it is deductible as a business expense. There is no good rapid transit connection between my home and my office, and I do not fit into a regular cab, or so I tell myself. The car is a Lincoln Town Car, in midnight blue to distinguish it from all the black ones. My driver, who has been with me for nearly six years, is called Omar. He is a Palestinian and, like me, a heavy-class weight lifter. He was driving a cab when we met, and we both complained about how the
regulation cabs they had in New York were not designed for men like us, either as passengers or drivers, and from that came my decision to get the Lincoln and have Omar drive it. He is a terrific driver, both safe and speedy, doesn’t drink, and keeps the car spotless. His only fault (if you can call it one) is that when it is time for prayer, he feels obliged to pull over, get his rug out of the trunk, and kneel down on the sidewalk. This has not happened more than a few times with me aboard, however.

I am not devout myself, although I am not an atheist either. Nor an agnostic, a position I consider absurd, and excessively timorous. I suppose I am a Catholic still, although I do not practice the faith. Like the demons in hell, I believe and tremble. If people ask, I say this is because certain positions of the hierarchy or the Vatican are repugnant to me, as if the church were not quite good enough to contain the glory that is Jake Mishkin, but this is not true. I abandoned worship so that I could be a devil among the women. Yes, my single expensive hobby.

Back to Monday…I was in the gym, which is at Fifty-first off Eighth Avenue. Part of the gym is a regular carpeted Nautilus operation for the locals, but the weight room is unusually well appointed. This is because the proprietor, Arcady V. Demichevski, formerly lifted heavy for the old Soviet Union. Arcady will give you weight-lifting advice if you ask him, and he has a Russian-style steam room with a masseur on site. This end of the gym smells of wintergreen, sweat, and steam. Arcady says the great lifters lift with their heads more than their bodies, and this I have found to be true. It should be impossible for a human being, however muscled, to heave a quarter ton of deadweight into the air, but it is regularly done. As noted already, I have done it myself. It is all about concentration and, who knows, some strange form of telekinesis. It is marvelously relaxing for me to spend an hour or so in the middle of the day lifting weights. When I am done lifting, and have had a steam, I can barely remember that I am a lawyer.

In any case, I had just finished a set of three-hundred-pound bench presses with Omar spotting me. As I was filling my water bottle at the fountain on the Nautilus side, I spied two men entering the gym. They spoke to Evgenia, Arcady’s daughter, at the front desk and I saw her point
me out. They came over to me, showed their badges, and introduced themselves as police detectives: Michael Murray and Larry Fernandez. We are so prepped by the cop shows to be interviewed by the police, we have all seen it a zillion times, that when it happens in real life it is oddly anticlimactic. The actual cops looked like the guys who just missed getting the TV part: an ordinary medium-size Jewish-type New York guy and a ditto Hispanic. Murray was somewhat more overweight than they like to show on TV, and Fernandez had misshapen teeth. It was somewhat hard to keep a straight face as they asked me if I knew Andrew Bulstrode, because I imagined what we were doing playing out on the small screen, and I sensed also that they did as well, that they had even learned how to behave from watching
N.Y.P.D. Blue
and
Law & Order.

I answered that he was a client of mine, and they asked me when I saw him last, and I said the first time was the last time, and then they asked if I knew why anyone would have wanted to harm him. I said no, but also that I didn’t know him all that well, and I asked them why they’d come to see me. They said they had found a binder agreement in his room in a residence hotel on upper Broadway that Columbia keeps for visiting faculty, at which point I asked them
had
anyone harmed him? They said that someone had visited him in that room on Sunday night, tied him to a chair, and, apparently, tortured him to death. They asked me what I was doing Sunday night, and I told them about Ingrid.

Tortured to death. They didn’t supply any details and I did not pry. I recall being shocked but, and this was strange too, not surprised. I neglected to tell the police about the package he had given me, for I considered that it was none of their business, not, at least, until I had taken the time to examine it myself.

T
HE
B
RACEGIRDLE
L
ETTER
(3)