Michael Gruber - The Book of Air and Shadows

He pounded the papers with a stubby digit. “Do you realize what this is?”

“Sort of. Miranda read it and explained its value, although I’m sure I don’t have a scholar’s sense of it.”

“Miranda Kellogg? She’s seen this?” He seemed a little upset.

“Well, yes. She’s the legal owner of the original.”

“But you have custody of it at present?”

So I related the events of the past twenty-four hours. He was stunned. “That’s terrible,” he said. “Absolutely catastrophic!”

“Yes, I’m extremely concerned about her.”

“No, I meant the manuscript, the original ,” he said, with a callousness worthy of a lawyer. “Without that, this is valueless,” he added, tapping the pile of copy paper again. “My God, we have to get it back! Do you have any idea what’s at stake?”

“People are always asking me that, and my answer is ‘not really.’ Ammunition in some literary squabble?” My tone was cold but he ignored it, for this was a new Mickey, no more the laid-back gentleman-scholar, amusingly contemptuous of how his confreres struggled to climb the greasy poles of academe. He had the fire in his eye. The new Mickey expatiated upon the colossal academic value of Mr. B.’s screed; I listened, as to someone describing the details of a complex and tedious surgical procedure.

At length I put in, “So it’s a big deal if Shakespeare was a Catholic?”

“It’s a big deal if Shakespeare was anything . I already went through this with you. We know almost nothing about the interior life of the greatest writer in the history of the human race. Look…just one example of thousands, and bears on the matter at hand. A woman has recently written a book, she’s an amateur scholar, but she’s certainly done her research, and in this book she claims that nearly the whole corpus of Shakespeare’s work, in particular the plays, is an elaborate coded apology for Catholicism and a plea to the monarch of the day for relief of the disabilities that Catholics then suffered. I mean she gives literally hundreds of heterodox readings arguing this theory in reference to all the plays, and she also proposes the protective hand of powerful contemporary Catholic peers to explain why Shakespeare wasn’t called to account for writing this easily readable code for the public stage. I mean it’s a complete and original picture explaining nearly all of Shakespeare’s work. How about that?”

I shrugged and asked, “So-is she right?”

“I don’t know! Nobody knows!” This a semishout, provoking more looks from the peers. I could now see why Mickey might hesitate to dine here. “That’s the fucking point , Jake! She could be right. Or someone could write a book demonstrating through just as thorough an analysis of the same plays that Shakespeare was gay, a good Protestant faggot. Or a monarchist. Or a lefty. Or a woman. Or the Earl of Oxford. That’s the basic, intractable problem with all Shakespeare studies that bear on intent or biography, and now this!” Tap tap tap. “If genuine…I say if genuine, it will be the greatest single event in Shakespeare studies since…I don’t know, since forever. Since the field was born as a rational entity in the eighteenth century.”

“This letter does that?”

“Not as such. It’s just the first taste, the first tiny opening taste of paradise. But Jake”-he lowered his voice and moved his mouth closer to my ear in a near parody of a man seeking confidentiality-“Jake, if this guy spied on William Shakespeare, if he wrote down reports, if he described Shakespeare’s life the way he described his own miserable life…oh, Jesus, that would be something real . Not just speculation based on the use of images in the second act of King fucking Lear , but actual data. Who he saw, what he said, his ordinary speech, what he believed, what he ate and drank, was he a big tipper, how long was his dick…Jake, you have no fucking idea.”

“Well, I have some idea what that manuscript play would be worth.” He rolled his eyes and made a show of fanning his face. “Oh, that . We are not going to even think about that . No, I will be creaming in my panties if we can even get hold of those ciphered letters he mentions. No wonder old Bulstrode was playing it so close, the poor bastard. Not to speak ill of the dead, but you might’ve thought that after all I did for him he would’ve given me a little peek when this fell into his hands.”

“It must’ve driven him crazy. He didn’t say anything to his niece either.”

“Yes. Poor woman. You don’t have any idea where these spy letters could be?”

“I don’t, but what I want to know now, and maybe you can help me here, is why a Russian gangster is interested in them enough to commit a federal crime. He’s probably not in the Modern Language Association.”

“An organization brimful of gangsters and worse,” said Mickey, smiling. “But I take your point.” He paused, and a peculiar dreamy expression came over his face for just an instant, as if he had just inhaled a mouthful of opium, eyes partly closed, as if contemplating a paradise just out of reach. He came back, however, with an almost audible snap and said,

“Unless…”

I knew just what he meant. “Yeah, unless Bulstrode discovered something on his trip to England that established the existence of the…Item. The Item, let’s say, really exists, and these guys, or someone hiring these guys, knows about it and wants it. But it turns out that the ciphered letters are part of the trail that leads to it. Do we even know if they were with this letter?”

“You’re asking me?”

“Well, yeah. You know more about all this stuff than anyone else but Bulstrode himself and possibly Miranda, both of whom are currently out of reach. Obviously, someone offered Bulstrode a manuscript. What if there were others in the bundle, and he declined to buy them?”

“Impossible! He would’ve sold both his grandmothers for a package like that.”

“Yes, but absent a bull market in grandmothers, how much would he have had to offer, say for just the Bracegirdle original?”

“I don’t know…fifty grand, maybe, if the seller wanted instant cash. At auction, God knows what it would have fetched. Maybe twice that, three times…”

“And did Bulstrode have that kind of cash?”

“Hell, no. He was skinned by the lawyers over that phony Hamlet business. I had to advance him money on his salary when he came over here. Wait a minute…!”

“Yeah, right. If he didn’t have serious money, how did he get hold of the manuscript? Two possibilities. Either he paid a far lower price to an owner who didn’t know what it was, in which case, when the seller was conned into thinking that the Bracegirdle wasn’t worth that much, and if he had the ciphers, he didn’t offer them to Bulstrode at all. Or, Bulstrode sees the whole package and the seller knows the real value and he wants major bucks for it. So why doesn’t Bulstrode go to the Folger? Or to his good pal Dr. Haas for that matter?”

A bitter laugh here. “Because he knew I was broke too?”

“Did he? But let’s say it was because the provenance is shaky. The seller is something of a crook himself, but he knows the value of these letters as a key to something even more gigantic. So Bulstrode goes to Mr. Big and sells him on a deal-help me buy the package and we’ll find the most valuable item on earth and-”

“That’s ridiculous! I mean, sure, Andrew could have lowballed a naive seller, but he couldn’t possibly have known any Mr. Bigs. He hardly knew anyone in New York.”

I thought about this and agreed that Mickey was probably right. Miranda had said much the same thing. I thought for a while and said, “Then there has to be a tertium quid.”