Michael Gruber - The Book of Air and Shadows

All of that is remarkably clear and burned into my memory, and has formed the theme of many nightmares since: I awake sweating, imagining that I have killed two men, and then it hits me that it is not a dream, that I really have killed them. A uniquely unpleasant experience. It is actually quite difficult to kill someone with a handgun unless the bullet strikes and destroys the heart or the brain, or creates internal bleeding, for pistol bullets are not terribly powerful. A standard 9 mm round generates about 350 foot-pounds of energy at the muzzle, which is no fun if it hits you, but not absolutely devastating, which is why you get those situations where the cops shoot someone forty times. Cops are trained to keep shooting until the target is down, and occasionally it takes that much lead to do it. Rifle bullets are vastly more powerful, and this is why soldiers carry rifles. A 30.06 round hits with nearly three thousand foot-pounds, and yes I am avoiding the next part with this bumf, which I got from my brother during his glorious military career, because the memory is both horrible and vague in that bad-dream way where you imagine that it might even have been worse than you recall, a supposition supported in the aftermath when, from time to time, a mercifully forgotten detail will bob up out of the dark to appall you anew.

So here I am standing amid the gun stink and the Crosetti children are gathered around their mother lifting her to her feet and placing her on the couch and she is absolutely covered in blood and tissue bits from the wounds of the guy whose brains I just blew out. I am looking down at the dead face of the third man: I only shot him twice but obviously I got lucky because he’s clearly dead, the eyes half-open, the face white and slack, the blood pool is huge, the size of a small trampoline. A good-looking guy, late twenties. Well, I don’t care to study him, nor the fellow with his brains spattered over Mrs. Crosetti’s end table, so I stroll over to the window and shift the blinds, and I see a gun battle going on, whose participants are a guy from the black SUV, a man shooting over the hood of a Cadillac hearse, whom I’ve never seen before, and Omar, shooting from behind the Lincoln. Somehow, I can’t get interested in this, it all seems so far away, and now I notice that my knees are shaking so badly that I literally can no longer stand up. I therefore fall into an easy chair. I hear sirens, although at first it is hard to distinguish these from the ringing in my ears. Now there is a transition that I can’t quite recall, although perhaps Mrs. Crosetti asked me how I was doing.

Then, somehow, the room was full of shouting cops, the kind with submachine guns, helmets, and black uniforms, rather like the ones my granddaddy wore. (And how did American police come to dress like the SS, and how come no one objected to it? Or to the Nazi-style helmets our troops now wear? Where are the semioticians when we need them? All bitching about Shakespeare, probably.) Many of these submachine guns were pointed at me and I realized I was still holding the handgun on my lap, like a lady holds a purse at the opera.

I was made to lie prone and I was cuffed, but I did not get arrested, since the person directing the invasion had been a colleague of the late Lieutenant Crosetti and was, therefore, inclined to listen to sense from Mrs. Crosetti, or Mary Peg, as she has since asked me to call her. We are all buddies now, it seems. Ms. Crosetti-Donna-has appointed herself defense lawyer for both me and Omar, and for a hearse driver named Klim, who is also a Polish cryptographer working on our ciphers, as I later learned. Paramedics arrived too and declared my victims dead and carried them off, leaving a truly remarkable amount of gelling blood behind. The police took statements at the scene. Each of the participants went singly into the kitchen and spoke to a pair of detectives, whose names I have forgotten, as I have forgotten the burden of what I told them. They seemed satisfied that I acted in self-defense; I got the impression that Mary Peg disposed of a good deal of authority in the NYPD. The only people arrested were the driver of the SUV and the wounded thug, who had been picked up wandering through the neighborhood some blocks away.

Eventually the police left. They had two fall guys to blame all the gunfire on, and they could not see a way to arrest anyone else without involving the widow and son of a heroic cop. Mary Peg looked at the wreckage of her living room and began to wail and I joined her, quite disgracefully. Klim threw his arms around her and spoke softly in her ear, and Omar did the same for me. In retrospect, the story of the gunfight on the street is obvious. Omar was waiting in the Lincoln when the SUV zoomed up and the three armed men jumped out and ran into the house. Omar grabbed his gun and took off after them, but the driver shot at him, and Omar dived behind our car and returned fire. Then the hearse arrived and Klim joined the fray. Remarkably, none of the three was injured, which shows again how paltry is the handgun for any serious slaughter, except by accident or at extremely close range against the unarmed.

Later, pizzas were ordered and we all sat around the kitchen table and ate them and drank red wine and congratulated ourselves on our survival. Donna Crosetti left, after advising her clients not to talk to the police, and Mary Peg and Albert Crosetti seemed to relax a little, and become somewhat more free in their conversation and their drinking. We had coffee made with generous slugs of Jameson whiskey. The events of the evening retreated a little, and I only burst into tears one additional time, although I was able to slip out to the bathroom before the spasm arrived. Post-traumatic stress is the current term for what you feel when you have killed another human, and it doesn’t really matter if it was justified or not, although murder is the national sport of many of the world’s nations, and thousands upon thousands of people seem to be able to do it without concern or remorse. I will probably never recover from it myself.

Actually, that’s not true. You think you’ll never recover, but you do, or I did. Perhaps there is more of Grandfather in me than I thought. Paul has apparently recovered from a much more extensive career as a killer, although he says he prays daily for the souls of the people he dispatched over in Asia. I don’t really know what this means, “pray for the souls.”

At any rate I emerged from the john, and none of the party adverted to my red eyes. Klim was engaged in an argument with young Crosetti that I found intriguing, in which the Pole made the case that the only thing that would stop what now seemed to be escalating violence was to retrace the footsteps of Bulstrode and to find what he had found, if anything, and if anything, get hold of it. Once the Thing was in hand, of course, and public, there would be no question of anyone needing to commit further acts of violence. If there was Nothing, on the other hand, then we would need to convince the bad guys of this, a somewhat more difficult, but not impossible, task. The important thing was to up the tempo, so that we were not reacting defensively but in control of the game. As in chess.

Crosetti was saying that no, the point was not to get any deeper into it, to stay close to home. If someone wanted the papers they could have them, he wanted nothing more to do with the whole thing. I felt sorry for the kid. I sympathized-I also wanted all of it not to have happened. But I also thought that Klim was right. As long as someone with no morals and access to armed men thought we had a lead on an Item that might be worth a hundred million bucks, then not one of us was safe. Klim thought he could watch over Mary Peg well enough for a short time, and the cops would keep an eye on the rest of the Crosettis, at least for a while, as well as turning up the heat on various Russian mobsters. But that was only a temporary solution, as he pointed out. The tale of the treasure would spread in the underworld, and before long, some other fiend would take a crack at it.