Michael Gruber - The Book of Air and Shadows

W.S., comeing amongst them all, saith what betides gentlemen, why this affray? And soe the tale: of the monies payd each night. Players sharers must have such portion, Housekeeper sharers yet another & further fees out of the nightes purse variously figured. Mr Pusey hath a booke in which all monies are wrote down, yet I o’erlookinge it see it is done poorlie in the olde fashioun as it were some pettie fishmonger & not a greate enterpryse such as this theatre: for wickednesse yieldeth up much proffit. W.S. saith good Mr Pusey fetch thee thy board and jetones & we will see the figuring done before oure eies, are we not alle honest fellowes who can cut a figure with the beste; and made them smyle with this witte & off Mr Pusey goes. Now I inquire of W.S. what are the shares of each & how figured & I studie the accomptes booke laid open & look close at the scratchinges men maketh when they use compters & board to keep theyre talleyes & I see the faulte of castynge-off he hath made. Mr Pusey not retourning, Mr Burbage shouts for Spade to fetch him & whilst he is off I take my wad penselle and doe the needefull sums & divisiouns into partes. Soe returneth Spade with Mr Pusey in tow carrying his board with the compters dropping out of his sleaves; he hath been at drinke & now too fuddled to make sence of his papiers: which no man could any way make sence of even if sober. I spake up then upon the matter & shew them my reckoninges & discourse upon my methodes. Which were a wonder to them & I see W.S. smyling upon me: for he doates upon clevernesse in anie thinge. Further I saye gentlemen it is vain to quarrell upon who warrantes what sum, for with this accomptinge there be no waye under heaven you can saie what gaine you hath. Further, though I saye naught gainst this gentleman, who anie waye I knowe not, yet as thinges stand anie man could rob you all at will nor would you ever knowe of it. It is as if you walked blind-folde down Shoreditch at mid-night with full purses held in youre fingeres & expect not to have ’ em snatched. Soe some further talke & twas agreed that I should be hyred to re-caste the accompte bookes in the Italian style with double-entreys & have charge of the divisioun of the shares: here W.S. saith he will stand bond for me as I am hys cosen.

After this W.S. carreys me to supper at the Mer-mayde & verie merrey with hys friendes as I have sayde before & later to bed in chamberes neare hys owne in a howse he leases neare to Black-Fryres & whilst theyre I laughed oute lowde & he quares why & I saye you intended Batchelour of Fartes, for hee hath broke winde then. He smileth, sayeing wee will make a witt of you Dick, one daye wilt thou catch the jest at the instant & not further in the weeke. To bed thereafter & methinkes I have done well enow for I am in the verie bosome of these wicked villeynes, which I think doth advance greatlie oure venture. With alle honour & my humble duty to yr. Lordship & may God protect you & blesse oure enterprizes, from London this Friday the 10 thJanuarye 1610 Richard Bracegirdle

Someone once said, Paul Goodman I think, that stupidity was a character defense and had little to do with intelligence, one reason the so-called best and brightest got us into Vietnam and why people who are smart enough to accumulate huge piles of wealth persist in doing things that get them major jail time. Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens , as, reportedly, my maternal grandmother used to say, quoting Schiller: against stupidity the gods themselves struggle in vain. In any case, it was stupid to tell my son about the gangsters and then my wife-no wait, the font of the stupidity was not immediately surrendering the Bracegirdle manuscript, after which no gangster would have had any interest in me or mine.

As I’ve said, Amalie is ordinarily of saintly mien, but like Our Lord when confronted with hypocrisy or injustice she has the ability to generate anger sufficient to wither fig trees. After she had wormed the whole tale out of me, in horrible little snips mixed with futile lies, I got the full blast of it, such that the resources of even her perfectly fluent English for insulting my intelligence were exhausted and she had to switch over to German: saudumm, schwachsinnig, verblödet, verkorkst, vertrottelt, voll abgedreht, and dumm wie die Nacht finster sein, to recall just a few. German is rich in such expletives, and they often filled the air of my childhood home. “Stupid as the night is dark” was in fact one of Mutti’s favorites. Finally: du kotzt mich an , which is quite vulgar and means roughly, “you make me puke.” With that, I was out on the street. I had received the reaming in near silence, conscious of a perverse pleasure in having at last violated the holy patience of my spouse. I called Rashid, he arrived in minutes, he stepped out to open the door for me (something that Omar has been told not to bother with), and I noticed he was looking upward and I did too as Paphiopedilum hanoiensis came flying from the top floor of Amalie’s house, just missing my car and smashing its new pot on the street. I had made her both angry and violent-a good night’s work and another down payment on my condo in Hell.

That, as it turned out, was the best part of the evening. After Rashid dropped me off and I stuck my key in the street door I noticed that it swung open before I’d had a chance to turn the lock. Someone had jammed the latch with a bit of duct tape. Heart in mouth I raced up the flights. The door to my loft hung open. Inside, in the narrow hallway that leads to the bedrooms, I found Omar. He was on his hands and knees groaning and seemingly examining a bright red oval on the polished oak floor, for blood was dripping down either side of his face from a wound in the back of his shaved skull. I lifted him up and into an armchair and obtained a clean dishcloth, a basin of water, and a bag of ice from the kitchen. When I had the wound washed and the bleeding under control, I asked him what had happened. I recall feeling an unnatural calm as I sat there listening to his groggy mumbles-in Arabic to begin with-a calm that recalled my army days as a medic, when the wounded were unloaded in large numbers from the dust-off helicopters after a firefight: the first moment you wanted to run away screaming and then came the unnatural calm that enabled you to work on mangled boys. I wanted to run screaming now through my loft to see what had happened to Miranda, but I made myself sit and ask and listen. There was not much to tell. He had heard a woman’s shout and a heavy thump and come running in from the living room where he had been watching cable news. That’s all he remembered. He didn’t see anyone. Miranda, of course, was gone, as was the original of the Bracegirdle manuscript.

I found Detective Murray’s card in my wallet and called him and left an urgent message and then dialed 911. After this we had the sort of confused interaction of many strangers, of the sort that’s always cut away in television dramas about crime and emergency, but which in real life absorbs many frustrating hours. Paramedics removed Omar, although he insisted upon walking down the stairs under his own power, and I entertained the police, first a pair of uniformed officers and then a pair of detectives, Simoni and Harris. They examined the front door of my loft and declared that the lock showed signs of picking, which made the affair more serious, not so much a domestic thing, which is what I imagined they thought when they arrived-a bleeding man, a missing woman, rich people, unholy liaisons…still, they couldn’t keep the snarkiness out of their voices. I imagined they were searching for some witty remark, of the sort that the scriptwriters used to put in the mouth of Jerry Orbach on the old Law & Order . They wanted to know who Omar was and where he came from and what was his relationship with the missing woman; and there was Omar’s pistol to explain, and my idea of the threat against Ms. Kellogg and what had happened out on the street with the maybe Russian thugs. Ms. Kellogg was staying here with you? Why wasn’t she at a hotel? Was she your girlfriend, Mr. Mishkin?