Michael Gruber - The Book of Air and Shadows

“What does the rest of it say?”

“Oh, it contains a quite vivid description of the battle itself, and these are always of interest to military historians. And apparently he served in the early stages of the Thirty Years’ War, ditto. He was at White Mountain, Lützen, and Breitenfeld, although he gives no detail about these. Pity. A professional artillerist, it seems, and trained as a cannon-founder. He also claims to have made a voyage to the New World and been shipwrecked off Bermuda. A very interesting seventeenth-century life, even a remarkable life, and potentially of great value to certain narrow fields of study, although I suspect there’s also a touch of Munchausen in his narrative. But nothing about Shakespeare, I’m afraid.” A pause here. Leaden silence for a good thirty seconds; then, “I would be happy to purchase it from you, if you like.”

Crosetti looked at Carolyn, who returned a neutral stare. He swallowed and asked, “For how much?”

“Oh, for a Jacobean manuscript of this quality I should think perhaps, ah, thirty-five would be the going rate.”

“Dollars?”

An indulgent smile. “Hundred, of course. Thirty-five hundred. I could write you a check now if you like.”

Crosetti felt his belly twist, and the sweat started to bead up on his forehead. This was wrong. He didn’t know how he knew, but he did. His father had always talked about instinct, although he always called it his gut, how you always went with your gut when you were out on the street in harm’s way. Crosetti’s gut made him say, “Uh, thanks, but I think I’d like a second opinion. I mean on the translation. Um, no offense, Dr. Bulstrode, but I’d like to eliminate the possibility that…” He gestured haphazardly, not willing to put it into words. He had remained standing after handling the manuscript, so it was an easy matter to snatch the papers from Bulstrode’s desk and slip them into the brown paper wrapper. Bulstrode shrugged and said, “Well, suit yourself, although I doubt you’ll get a better price.” Turning then to Carolyn, he asked, “And how is dear Sidney these days? Quite recovered from the shock of the fire I hope.”

“Yes, he’s fine,” said Carolyn Rolly in a voice so unlike her own that Crosetti stopped wrapping and looked at her. Her face was pained in a way he could not interpret. She said, “Crosetti, would you step outside for a minute with me? Excuse us, Professor.”

Bulstrode smiled a plump formal smile and gestured to his door.

Outside, a scant summer population of students and professors passed to and fro; it was clearly the interval between classes. Rolly grabbed Crosetti’s arm and pulled him into an alcove, the first time since the crying jag of the previous evening that she had touched him. She clung to his arm and spoke vehemently in a hoarse tense voice. “Listen! You have to let him have those goddamn papers.”

“Why do I? He’s obviously trying to pull the wool over our eyes.”

“Not our eyes, Crosetti. He’s right. There’s no mention of Shakespeare. It’s some petty clerk running a scam and dying and confessing his sins.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“Why not? What’s your evidence? Wishful thinking and three hours’ experience with secretary hand?”

“Maybe, but I’m going to show it to someone else, someone I trust.”

As he said this, he saw her eyes grow fat with tears and her face began to crumple. “Oh, God,” she cried, “oh, God, don’t let me come apart now! Crosetti, don’t you get it? He knows Sidney. Why do you think he mentioned him just now?”

“Okay, he knows Sidney-so what?”

“So what! Jesus, man, don’t you see? He knows the manuscript came out of the Voyages , so he knows I’m taking the book apart. And that means…”

“You’re not just breaking it, like Sidney told you to. You’re trying to doctor it, which means you’re going to try to sell it. And he’s, what? Threatening to tell Sidney unless we give him the manuscript?”

“Of course! He’ll tell him, and then Sidney…I don’t know, he’ll fire me for sure and he might call the cops. I’ve seen him do it with shoplifters. He’s nuts that way, people stealing books and I can’t…I can’t take the chance…oh, God, this is horrible!”

She was frankly crying now, not hysterical yet as she was the night before, but building up to it, and that was something Crosetti had no wish to see again. He said, “Hey, calm down! You can’t take what chance?”

“The cops. I can’t be involved with the police .”

Lightbulb.

“You’re a fugitive.” It wasn’t a question. Obvious, really; he should have picked it up right off the bat.

She nodded.

“What’s the charge?”

“Oh, please! Don’t interrogate me!”

“You didn’t whack Uncle Lloyd?”

“What? No, of course not. It was some stupid dope thing. I was desperate for money and I moved packages for some people I knew. This was in Kansas, so of course the sky fell in and…oh, God, what am I going to do!”

“Okay, get yourself together,” he said, resisting the urge to wrap his arms around her. “Go back in there, and tell him it’s a deal.”

He started to move away and her face stiffened in what seemed like panic; he was happy to note that she clutched at his arm, as at a plank in a shipwreck.

“Where’re you going?”

“I just need to do something first,” he said. “Don’t worry, Carolyn, it’s going to be fine. I’ll be back in ten minutes.”

“What should I tell him?” she demanded.

“Tell him I got the runs from the excitement of his generous offer and I’m in the bathroom. Ten minutes!”

He turned and raced down the stairs, three at a time, holding the rolled manuscripts under his arm like a football. Out of Hamilton at a run, he threaded through a quad full of strolling young people who had higher SATs than he did and ran into the vast columned bulk of Butler Library. One advantage of having a well-known research librarian for a mother is that she knows nearly all the other research librarians in the city and is pals with a number of them. Crosetti had known Margaret Park, the head research librarian at Butler, since childhood, and it was an easy matter to call her up and get permission. All big libraries have large-format Xerox machines that can reproduce folio pages; Crosetti used the one in the Butler basement to copy all of Bracegirdle’s papers. He explained to the bemused but amenable Mrs. Park that this was all to do with a movie he had a chance to make (somewhat true) and could he also cadge a mailing tube and buy some stamps?

He rolled the copies into their tube and added the originals of the ciphered letters and the sermons. As he did this, he wondered why he hadn’t shown them to Bulstrode along with the Bracegirdle letter. Because the guy was an asshole and he was screwing him in some way on this deal, although Crosetti couldn’t prove it, and besides there was Carolyn to consider. But keeping the ciphers to himself gave him an obscure pleasure. Shakespeare or not, the sheets had kept their secrets for four centuries and he was reluctant to let them out of his own hands, he who had brought them into the light. He sealed the tube, wrote out an address label, added postage, dropped the tube into the outgoing mail cart, and trotted back to Hamilton Hall.

Fifteen minutes later he was walking with Rolly down the center of campus again, but in the opposite direction. Crosetti had a check for thirty-five hundred folded in his wallet and was feeling not exactly good, because he felt he’d been ripped off in a number of ways, but that he’d done the right thing. Doing the right thing had been a major expression around the house while he was being raised. His father had been a detective second grade with the NYPD in an era when to be a detective was to be on the pad, but Charlie Crosetti had not been on the pad, and had suffered for it, until the revelations of Serpico, when the chiefs had cast around for the straight and clean, and found him and promoted him to lieutenant in command of a Queens homicide squad. This was taken as a sign in the Crosetti household that virtue was rewarded. The present Crosetti still tended to believe this, despite all the evidence to the contrary that had accumulated in the years since. The woman walking beside him, however, seemed to set the moral universe on its ear. Yes, she’d been hideously abused (or so she said) but had responded with a kind of desperate amorality, a stance he found hard to condone. Every skell has a hard-luck story, his dad used to say. But he could not consider Carolyn Rolly a mere skell. Why not? His gonads? Because he lusted for her? No, not that either, or not only that. He wanted to ease her pain, make her grin, release the girl he glimpsed hiding under the dour, ascetic bookbinder.