Michael Gruber - The Book of Air and Shadows

She nodded slowly. I thought I saw her shiver, and I wanted to fling my arms around her, but forbore.

“Yes, in a horrible way,” she replied, “but I can’t imagine what it could be. I mean the value part. Uncle Andrew said he paid a few thousand for it and that’s probably near what it’s worth, or else why would the seller have sold it? And if for some reason it turned out to be more valuable, why would criminals be involved?”

“That’s the question, of course, but my sense is that it’s not the document itself that’s valuable, but what it leads to. Did your uncle tell you anything about that?”

“No. As far as I knew it was a Jacobean letter of some sort, of purely academic interest. He was really excited about it, and made a special trip to England last summer to check up on some things related to it, but he didn’t imply that it had any, well, pecuniary value. Did he tell you what it was? I mean what it might lead to.”

“Yes, he claimed it was an actual Shakespeare autograph manuscript, but I’m afraid he might have been unduly optimistic. Later, I spoke with Mickey Haas, and he suggested that this was unlikely, and that your uncle seemed to be somewhat desperate to, as it were, recoup his fortunes.”

“Yes, he was, he tended to be like that since the scandal. You know about that?”

“I’m familiar with the facts, yes. But he must have been aware of this criminal interest, since he deposited the damned thing with me. He must have suspected he might be attacked and wanted to preserve it from being taken. So…to continue, the first order of business would seem to be securing you personally. You clearly can’t return to your grotty hotel. We could change hotels…”

“I can’t afford to change hotels. It was all paid in advance anyway. Oh, God, this is turning into a nightmare…”

“…or, if I may, I have a large loft downtown. There are two bedrooms in it where my kids stay when they’re on school holidays. You could have one of them. It’s probably nearly as grotty as the Marquis, but free of charge. I also have a driver to take you around town. He used to be sort of a bodyguard.”

“A bodyguard?” she exclaimed and then asked, “Whom did he guard?”

“Yasir Arafat, actually. But we like to keep that part quiet. I can’t think of anyplace you’d be more safe.” Except from me, but let that pass for the moment. Honestly, I was not thinking of that at all when I made the offer. I recalled the terror on her uncle’s face quite well and did not want that look ever to appear on hers. “Once you’re stashed, we can see if we can learn something about the people involved from their vehicle. I’ll alert the police to this development and leave that part to them.”

She agreed to this plan after the usual polite demurrers. We left the reading room and then the library. At the top of the steps I steered her into the shadow of the porch columns and peered out at Fifth Avenue. There was no black SUV with smoked windows in sight. I called Omar on my cell and told him to meet us on the Forty-second Street side and then we hurried through Bryant Park and were waiting for the Lincoln as it pulled up.

My loft is on Franklin Street off Greenwich. It’s four thousand square feet in area, and the building used to be a pants factory, later a warehouse, but now it is chockablock full of rich people. I got into it before downtown real estate became psychotic, but it still set me back a bundle, and that doesn’t count the improvements. We used to live here as a family, Amalie, the kids, and me, until she moved out. Usually the guy moves out, but Amalie knew I really liked this place and also she wanted to be closer to the kids’ school, which is on Sixty-eighth off Lexington. They’re all now on East Seventy-sixth in a brownstone duplex. We split expenses right down the middle, because she has a good income and sees no reason why I should be beggared simply because I am a sexual asshole.

At the time under discussion, however, I was not thinking about that. I was showing Amalie 2 (aka Miranda Kellogg) around my dwelling. She was suitably impressed, which I found an improvement over Amalie 1, who was never impressed by things money could buy. I ordered Chinese takeout and we ate by candles at a low table I have from which you get a nice, if narrow, view of the river. I was a gentleman, and reasonably honest as we ate and exchanged histories. It turned out she was a child psychologist by training, working as a midlevel bureaucrat. We talked about Niko, my boy, and his problems. She was sympathetic in a rather distant way. As I became more familiar with her face, I decided that she did not resemble Amalie quite as much as I had originally thought, not feature by feature, but still there was that feeling of bubbling excitement when I looked at her. How little we know, how much to discover, from lover to lover, as the song has it.

She began to yawn, and perfectly proper, I made up the bed in Imogen’s room. I gave her a new white T-shirt to sleep in, and of course I had fresh toothbrushes because of my kids. I got sleepy thanks and a nice kiss on the cheek. What was that perfume? Elusive, but familiar.

The next day, we rose early, breakfasted on coffee and croissants, in a mood that was more companionable, I must admit, than it would have been had this been a Morning After. She had a certain distancing air about her that did not encourage aggressive intimacy seeking, which was fine with me: another reminder of Amalie back when. She dressed in the same little department-store wool suit she had worn the previous day, and Omar took us up to my office. Once there, I introduced her to Jasmine Ping, our brilliant estate lawyer, and left them to plumb the mysteries of probate and also help arrange for the transfer of Bulstrode’s body back to England.

My diary tells me I spent the morning dissuading a writer from suing another writer for stealing her ideas and from them producing a far more successful book than the writer’s own, and later on the phone with a fellow at the U.S. Trade Representative setting up a meeting about (what else?) Chinese IP pirates. A typical morning. At twelve-thirty or so Miranda appeared up at my office and I suggested lunch. She refused, I insisted, at which she shamefacedly admitted that she was still too frightened to wander freely in public and wished to eat in the office or be driven back to the loft.

We therefore ordered from a deli, and while we were waiting, Miranda broached the subject of the manuscript. She said that under her uncle’s tutelage she’d become an efficient reader of Jacobean secretary hand: could she not look at it now? I hesitated but saw no real objection. Heirs often make independent judgments on the value of prospective inheritables. I sent Ms. M. down to the vault.

While we were waiting our lunch arrived and we ate, sitting at my glass coffee table. She was a precise eater, tiny bites. We talked about IP and her uncle’s visit here, but she had no more idea about why he wanted or needed an IP lawyer than I did. Ms. Maldonado came back with the folder.

Miranda pulled on cotton gloves before she handled the stiff brown pages. She held several up to the window to examine watermarks. But the day had gone dark, with the beginnings of a spattering rain. She had to use the desk lamp instead.

“Interesting,” she said, and again as she passed the pages before the light. “This heavier paper is what they call a crown folio sheet, marked with the coat of arms of Amsterdam, which comes from a well-known paper house and quite common in the seventeenth century. The pages look like they were ripped out of a ledger. These other sheets seem to be printer’s copy and unrelated.” She mentioned the name of a paper maker, but I have forgotten what it was, and then she discoursed briefly about the provenance of paper. In one ear and out the other. She drew a folding magnifying glass from her handbag. “Do you mind?” she asked.