Michael Gruber - The Book of Air and Shadows

Doubrowicz leaned back in her chair and stared up at the coffered ceiling, fanned herself dramatically with her hand, and laughed her sharp little bark. It was a gesture familiar to Crosetti from his childhood, when the children had brought what they imagined was an utterly insolvable puzzle. “But, my dear Albert, all that, enticing as it is, is mere trivia compared to the real prize.”

Crosetti felt his throat dry up. “You mean that an autograph manuscript might still exist.”

“Yes, and not just that. Let me see, does he give a date anywhere?” She lifted her magnifier and cast over the sheets, like a bird seeking a scurrying bug. “Hm, yes, here is one, 1608, and here, ah yes, he seems to have begun his spying career around 1610. Do you understand the significance of that date, Albert?”

“ Macbeth ?”

“No, no, Macbeth was 1606. And we know how it came to be written and there were no secret Bracegirdles involved. The year 1610 was the year of The Tempest , and after that, except for some small things, collaborations and the like, Shakespeare wrote no more plays, and that means…”

“Oh, God, it’s a new play!”

“An unknown, unrecorded, unsuspected play by William Shakespeare. In autograph.” She placed her hand on her chest. “My heart. Darling, I think I am a little too old for this kind of excitement. In any case, if genuine, I say again, if genuine, well…you know we say ‘priceless’ very easily nowadays, by which we mean very expensive, but this would be truly in a class by itself.”

“Millions?”

“Pah! Hundreds…hundreds of millions. The manuscript alone, if proved authentic, would be certainly the most valuable single manuscript, perhaps the most valuable portable object, in the world, on a par with the greatest paintings. And then, whoever owned the manuscript would have the copyright too. I am not an expert here but that would be my guess. Theatrical productions-every director and producer on earth would be selling their children for the right to mount the premiere, and don’t even mention films! On the other hand, lest we build too high a castle in the air, the whole thing could be an elaborate fraud.”

“A fraud? I don’t get it-who’s defrauding who?”

“Well, you know Bulstrode was caught once by a clever forger. Perhaps they thought he was ripe for another try.”

“Really? I’d think he’d be the last person to go to. Who’d believe him? The whole point is that his credibility is shot, that’s why he’s so desperate to recoup.”

She laughed. “You should go up to Foxwood sometimes, to the casino. If those who lost heavily did not desperately try to recoup, as you put it, they would have to close their doors. Of course, were I a villain, I would not attempt such a scheme.”

“Why not?”

“Because, darling, how would you create the prize? The play itself? It is one thing to forge a bad quarto of Hamlet . We have Hamlet and we have bad quartos and we have some idea of Shakespeare’s sources for the play. And the text does not have to possess any particular quality. In parts it need not even make sense; bad quartos often do not. You know what a bad quarto is, yes? Good, so you must realize that here it is entirely different. Here you must invent an entire play by the greatest dramatic poet who ever lived, and who was then at the height of his powers. It can’t be done. Someone tried it already once, you know.”

“Who tried it?”

“A silly little fellow named William Henry Ireland, back in the eighteenth century. His father was a scholar, and Willie wanted to impress him, so he started finding documents related to Shakespeare in old trunks. Completely ludicrous, but with the state of analysis and scholarship that then was, many people were taken in. Well, nothing would do but that he had to find a new play by Shakespeare, and he did, an abortion he called Vortigern , and Kemble produced it at the Drury Lane Theatre. It was howled off the stage, naturally. Meanwhile the great scholar Malone had exposed all the other manuscripts as fraudulent and the whole thing collapsed. Now, Ireland was a dullard and easily exposed. Pascoe, the man who tricked Bulstrode, was a good deal smarter, but what we’re talking about is of another order. It could not be a mere pastiche, you see: it would have to be Shakespeare , and he is dead.”

“So you think it’s the real deal.”

“This I cannot say without examining the original. In the meantime, I will type out for you a Word document from this Bracegirdle’s letter so you will not have to learn Jacobean secretary hand and you can read what he has to say. Also, I will prepare another Word document based on these supposed enciphered letters so at least you can see what the ciphertext looks like. If you don’t mind, I would like to keep the letters here and run some elementary tests on them. If they are not genuine seventeenth century, of course, we can all have a good laugh and forget the whole thing. In fact, I will do that first, and if they prove genuine I will send to you the two documents by e-mail, and also I will give you the name of a man I know who is interested in ciphers and such things. If we can generate a solution, it gives us a bit of bargaining against Bulstrode. For he has not got these, and they may hold information about the location of the autograph play, do you see?”

Crosetti did. He said, “Thanks, Fanny. I feel like such a jerk.”

“Yes, but as I say all is perhaps not lost. I will be happy to meet this Bulstrode and tell him what I think of his sly tricks. Let me begin with the transcription of the cipher first. It should not take too long. Will you stay?”

“No, I have to get back to work. I don’t know a lot about crypto but maybe it’s a simple substitution. They couldn’t have been all that sophisticated back then.”

“Oh, I think you would be surprised. There are ciphers in French of the ancien régime that have never been broken. Still, we could be lucky.”

“Who’s this cipher expert you mentioned?”

“Oh, Klim? He is a Polish person too, but a more recent immigrant. He was a cryptanalyst with the WSW in Warsaw, that is, military counterintelligence. Now he drives a hearse. If you leave me alone now, I will have this done in a little bit. And don’t feel too bad about yourself, Albert. There was a woman involved, after all, and you are still young.”

Feeling as old as Fanny, however, Crosetti slumped out of the library and took the Madison bus uptown to the bookstore. There was a new woman working there, Pamela, this one genuinely ex-Barnard: short, earnestly intellectual, attractive, well-turned out, engaged to someone on Wall Street. It was as if Carolyn Rolly had never been, except that occasionally Glaser would mention that she had vanished without telling him what she had done with the prints from the Churchill Voyages. When Crosetti entered the shop today, however, Glaser hailed him and ushered him into the little office he kept in the rear of the shop.

“You’ll be interested to know that Rolly has surfaced,” Glaser announced. “Take a look at this.”

He handed Crosetti a brown envelope with the slick crinkly feel that announced it as foreign. It had a British stamp and a London postmark. Inside Crosetti found a letter written in Rolly’s beautiful italic hand, black ink on heavy cream paper. He felt his face grow hot and a pang darted down his center, and he had to restrain himself from raising the paper to his nostrils and sniffing it. He read:

Dear Sidney,

Please forgive me for leaving you in the lurch like this, and for not contacting you to let you know what I was doing. Since I didn’t know when the shop would reopen, I thought it would not be too much of a burden on you and would give you sufficient time to find a replacement. But I was rude not to call you earlier and I am sorry. What happened was that I was called away to London on urgent family business, which then turned into a career opportunity, so it looks like I will be staying here in the UK indefinitely.