Michael Gruber - The Book of Air and Shadows

“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 wasa 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?”