Michael Gruber - The Book of Air and Shadows

Miri has left her business, which I have to say here for the record was a high-class call girl ring. Shvanov was deeply involved in it, of course, and his arrest has done her a world of good. She is much with Paul now, doing good works. She still looks fabulous and wears a jeweled crucifix at all times and with all her outfits.

Dad was able to slip away in his characteristic fashion, and I find that, after seeing him again, he is not the cancer on my spirit that he once was. Do I believe the version of my past he conveyed to me in that limo? Perhaps. It hardly matters at this point. I suppose I have forgiven him.

I miss Mickey Haas. Even a dreamed-up best pal is better than no best pal at all. All three of the wives showed up at the funeral and all of us were as phony and civilized as could be. In the end he was true to his profession and to his artistic judgment, literally going through fire to save his Precious. How many members of the Modern Language Association could say the same?

Crosetti seems to be doing well. I ran into him and Carolyn Rolly with the two children a week or so ago on Canal just east of Lafayette. It was a Saturday, and I had just finished a dim sum lunch with a couple of guys I went to law school with who were visiting town, and I was on the street looking for Omar and the Lincoln when they hove into view. We chatted briefly and a little awkwardly. Carolyn has washed the camouflaging dark out of her hair, for the blond she showed me as Miranda is her natural color and her eyes are bright blue, not the grape green she had assumed via tinted contacts in homage to Amalie’s. There is not the slightest residual attraction. They live together in darkest arty Brooklyn, in a very nice loft bought by the sale of the Bracegirdle mss., and he has sold his script about the Bracegirdle affair, helped, I imagine, by the immense publicity surrounding the case. He thinks John Cusack will actually play him in the movie, although William Hurt is unfortunately not available for me.

I told him what I was doing at work and will now tell this record, which was and is working on the immense IP case occasioned by Mary Queen of Scotland by William S. The actual ms. is part of the evidence in People v. Shvanov (murder and kidnap) and has been temporarily sequestered in a municipal vault, but as soon as I’d received it from Crosetti I had taken the liberty of securing the thing digitally, transmuting the pages into pure intellectual property, a string of words. I am naturally not the lawyer of record, since I am a principal claimant to the IP; Ed Geller is my man on it, and we are all pals again. We are mainly fighting the British crown for the rights, and so I am now one with G. Washington and the other Founding Fathers. Should the case be decided in my favor I will perhaps for the first time be wealthier than my wife, and as I mentioned this possibility on that busy street, I felt a pang of guilt. This is my new moral sense, and I fear it will sharply limit my professional practice. I proposed to Crosetti that he and Carolyn deserved a big chunk of any value accruing from the sale or rights to the play, and that they should stop by the office and discuss this matter, and then Omar swooped across three lanes and pulled neatly to the curb. I asked if I could give them a lift and they said it was Brooklyn and I said no matter, and I could see in the flash of a look that passed between them that they did not care to spend that much social time with me. So I insisted, just for form’s sake, and Crosetti said, “Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown,” and I said, “I bet you’ve waited ten years to say that in real life,” and he laughed and we all of us laughed at that.

The author would like to thank Thomas D. Selz, Esq., of Frankfurt Kurnit Klein & Selz for his help explaining the mysteries of intellectual property law and for the view from his office, other than which he has not a thing in common with the intellectual property lawyer depicted in this novel.

MICHAEL GRUBER has been a marine biologist, a restaurant cook, a federal government official, and a political speechwriter. He lives in Seattle, Washington, and is currently at work on another novel.

www.michaelgruberbooks.com