Michael Gruber - The Book of Air and Shadows

He carefully mounted the steps to the veranda, pressed his face against the lighted window, saw a large room, rustic furniture made of polished cedar logs and upholstered in red plaid, a huge stone fireplace with a fire blazing away in it, Indian rugs on the floor, a moosehead over the fireplace. On another wall was a large built-in bookcase and an elaborate and expensive-looking sound system. No movement visible, no sounds. He tried the door, which swung open when he turned the brass knob, and he entered and closed the door behind him. Once inside he could hear over the whisper of the fire some domestic sounds from another room, clink of crockery, and a man’s humming. The place smelled of cedar, and the fire, and, faintly, fresh coffee. There was a round pine table near the side windows with a glowing laptop computer on it. Next to it was a familiar thick padded envelope. Crosetti was about to take a peek at the screen when Jake Mishkin entered the room carrying a steaming mug.

He stopped short and stared. “Crosetti? What’re you doing here?”

“I was in the neighborhood. I thought I’d drop by.”

Mishkin smiled faintly. “That’s a good line. Would you like some coffee? I’m having mine with Irish whiskey in it.”

“Thank you. That’d be great.”

Mishkin started to go back to the kitchen, then stopped and went to the laptop and snapped the screen down. Crosetti sat on the sofa that faced the fire and gave way a little to his exhaustion, feeling now that strange sensation one has after a marathon drive, of still traveling fast behind the wheel of a car. In a few minutes Mishkin returned with another mug and set it on the pickled pine coffee table in front of the couch.

“I trust this is not about your check,” said Mishkin after they had both drunk a little.

“No, I got that all right, thanks.”

“Then, to what do I owe…?”

“Carolyn Rolly. I got a panicky call from her giving me the address of this place and so I came up.”

“You drove-what? Eight hours through a snowstorm because Carolyn Rolly beckoned?”

“Yeah, it’s kind of hard to explain.”

“True love.”

“Not really, but…it’s something . Basically, I’m just being a schmuck.”

“I can relate to that,” said Mishkin, “as it happens, she’s not here, and I should point out that I’m expecting other visitors. There might be unpleasantness.”

“You mean Shvanov.”

“And others.”

“For instance?”

“For instance, Mickey Haas, the famous Shakespearean scholar and a dear friend of mine. This is his place we’re in. He’s coming up to authenticate our manuscript.”

“I thought you needed a lot of technical equipment for that, carbon dating, ink analysis…”

“Yes, but clever forgers can fake the ink and paper. What can’t be faked is Shakespeare’s actual writing, and Mickey is the man for that.”

“And he’s with Shvanov?”

“That’s a long story I’m afraid.”

Crosetti shrugged. “I got plenty of time, unless you’re going to force me at gunpoint out into a raging blizzard.”

Mishkin stared at him for a while and Crosetti held the stare for an unnatural interval. At last, Mishkin sighed and said, “We’ll need more coffee.”

Another pot, then, also with whiskey, and toward the end of it they dispensed with the coffee. They talked in the manner of strangers who have survived a shipwreck or some historic disaster which, while it leaves similar marks, does nothing to provide elective affinity. The two men were not friends, nor ever would be, but the thing that had brought them together, to this house on this snowy night, that lay now in its envelope on the round table, allowed them to speak to each other more openly than either of them normally would; and the whiskey helped.

Mishkin supplied the fuller version of his involvement with Bulstrode, and his sad life, not stinting on a description of his own sins, and when he came to his connection with the supposed Miranda Kellogg and his hopes regarding her, Crosetti said, “According to Carolyn she was an actress Shvanov hired to get the manuscript away from you.”

“Yes, I thought it was something like that. Do you…did she say what happened to her?”

“She didn’t know,” said Crosetti shortly and then began to speak about his own family and about movies, ones he loved and ones he wanted to make, and Mishkin seemed remarkably interested, fascinated in fact, with both of these subjects, about what it was like to grow up in a boisterous and happy family, and whether movies really determined our sense of how to behave, and more than that, our sense of what was real.

“Surely not,” Mishkin objected. “Surely it’s the other way around-filmmakers take popular ideas and embody them in films.”

“No, the movies come first. For example, no one ever had a fast-draw face-to-face shoot-out on the dusty Main Street in a western town. It never happened, ever. A screenwriter invented it for dramatic effect. It’s the classic American trope, redemption through violence, and it comes through the movies. There were very few handguns in the real old west. They were expensive and heavy and no one but an idiot would wear them in a side holster. On a horse? When you wanted to kill someone in the Old West, you waited for your chance and shot him in the back, usually with a shotgun. Now we have a zillion handguns because the movies taught us that a handgun is something a real man has to have, and people really kill each other like fictional western gunslingers. And it’s not just thugs. Movies shape everyone’s reality, to the extent that it’s shaped by human action-foreign policy, business, sexual relationships, family dynamics, the whole nine yards. It used to be the Bible but now it’s movies. Why is there stalking? Because we know that the guy should persist and make a fool of himself until the girl admits that she loves him. We’ve all seen it. Why is there date rape? Because the asshole is waiting for the moment when resistance turns to passion. He’s seen Nicole and Reese do it fifty times. We make these little decisions, day by day, and we end up with a world. This one, like it or not.”

“So screenwriters are the unacknowledged legislators of mankind.”

“You got it,” said Crosetti. “I mean we’re in a movie now . Why in hell are the two of us waiting in an isolated cabin for a bunch of gangsters? It’s nuts. Why is a hundred-million-dollar manuscript sitting on a table in that isolated cabin? Totally wack. I’ll tell you why. Because we both made a chain of decisions, and each of those decisions was conditioned by a movie theme. When the mysterious girl calls John Cusack and tells him to rescue her, he doesn’t say, ‘Get real, bitch!’ He moves heaven and earth to rescue her, because he knows that’s the script, and here I am, and right next to me is William Hurt, the slightly corrupt, guilty guy, still clinging to decency, but not sure if he wants to live or not and he’s put himself in this dangerous situation for…for what? Oh, there’s his mysterious girl, of course, but mainly it’s self-punishment, a need to have some major explosion to either wipe him out or blow him the hell out of his expensive unsatisfactory life. Stay tuned.”

“William Hurt. That’s not bad.”

“No, and when the gangsters get here, they’ll act like gangsters in the movies, or, and here’s a subtlety that’s not often used, they’ll act the opposite of movie gangsters. That’s the great thing about The Sopranos -movie gangsters pretending to be real gangsters watching movie gangsters and changing their style to be more like the fake ones, but the fact is, it really happens. The one thing you can be sure of is they’re not going to be authentic. There’s no authentic left.”