Michael Gruber - The Book of Air and Shadows

And we did have it, on my little machine. Paul had been insistent about that, even going so far as insuring that the batteries were freshly bought ones. After Pascoe wound down, Paul said, “Well, let’s see what you can do,” and brought from his briefcase some folio sheets of what appeared to be old paper, a small glass bottle of sepia-colored ink, and three goose quills. Pascoe’s face lit when he saw them, as a mom’s might at the sight of her baby, and he quickly rose, took the material, and sat at his little desk. He examined the paper carefully, holding it to the light of his desk lamp, and made sounds of appreciation. Then he opened the ink bottle, smelled it, tasted it, rubbed a drop between his thumb and forefinger.

“Marvelous stuff,” he said at last. “The paper is genuine seventeenth century and the ink’s tallow soot and oxgall. I assume the ink’s extracted from old documents?”

“Of course,” said Paul.

“Brilliant! Wherever did you get it?”

“The Vatican Library,” said Paul. “A deaccession.”

Pascoe grinned. “Well, that’s one word for it,” he said, and without further speech set about trimming the goose quills, using an X-Acto knife Paul provided. While he was doing that, Paul brought out what I recognized as a page photocopied from our Bracegirdle ms. Pascoe readied his quill and, after testing it on some scrap paper, set to work. We sat. Paul took out his breviary and mumbled. It was like an afternoon at a Benedictine scriptorium, without the bells.

“There!” said Pascoe, handing over the page. “What d’you think of that?”

We looked. He had copied the first ten lines of the Bracegirdle ms. three times in all, the first one rather crude, the second one much better, and the third indistinguishable, to my eye at least, from Bracegirdle’s own hand.

It seemed to satisfy Paul as well, because he began to put all the things we had brought, including the forgery practice page, back into his portfolio. Pascoe watched the paper and ink vanish with an expression of longing.

I waited until we were back in the Merc before I spoke. “Would you mind telling me what that was all about?”

“It’s a forgery. I told you before, the whole thing is an elaborate scam.”

“So it seems. What was that at the beginning about a payment?”

“Pascoe has a boyfriend and wants to keep him provided for. That’s why he did the forgery and that’s why he spoke to us. I arranged for the boyfriend to receive a nice check.”

“You’re abetting unnatural acts?”

“Not at all. Mr. Pascoe is safe in prison and incapable of doing any but solitary unnatural acts. He shows a laudable concern that his honey not be forced to go out on the streets as a rent boy, and wishes to support him. I believe it’s simple charity to help him out.”

“You really are a perfect hypocrite, aren’t you?”

Paul laughed. “Far, far from perfect, Jake. The interesting thing is that this young fellow our Pascoe is supporting in luxury is the same one whose testimony landed him in jail after that Hamlet thing.”

“And how did you figure all this out?”

“Oh, I have contacts. The Society of Jesus is a worldwide organization. I had someone go talk with Pascoe and out came the story, perfect confidentiality of course, and I approached Pascoe by phone before we left.”

“So what do we do now?”

“The same thing we would have done if the thing were genuine,” said Paul. “Go through all the hoops, get the fake play, and deliver it to the bad guys. That gets you and yours off the hook.”

“And what about the bad guys? What about Bulstrode and whoever sent the people I shot? They get a free pass?”

“That’s up to you, Jake. You’re an officer of the court, I’m not. My only interest is in making sure this whole mess goes away.”

The car was now moving in the direction of Oxford, and Mr. Brown informed us that we had been followed to the prison and were still being followed. Paul was pleased at this, as it would confirm to the bad guys that we had actually been to see Pascoe and would add an important detail to our forgery story. What was I thinking of after these revelations? I was plotting about how to use them to secure another meeting with Miranda Kellogg or whoever she was. I have described my Niko as an obsessive-compulsive, and he is, poor little guy, but, you know, the apple does not fall far from the tree.

I pulled out my cell phone and dialed, not because I particularly wanted to speak with Crosetti, but as what psychologists call a displacement activity. Animals, for example, lick their genitals when placed in anxious situations, but higher animals reach for a ciggie or, latterly, their cell phones. I was annoyed to receive a recorded message that the cell phone customer I was trying to reach was unavailable. Was the man really so stupid as to have turned off his phone? I disconnected and made another call, booking a suite at the Dorchester: for people like me spending lots of money is another sort of displacement activity. During this ride, we managed to transfer the recording of the conversation we’d had with Pascoe to my laptop and thence to a CD, which Paul took. I forbore to ask.

They dropped me off at the hotel some hours afterward. The atmosphere in the car had been fairly chilly and unrelieved by any dramatic confrontations. We discussed security. Mr. Brown assured us that his people would be watching over me in the city as well.

“This must be costing a fortune,” I observed.

“It is,” said Paul, “but you’re not paying for it.”

“What? Surely not the law firm?”

“No. Amalie is.”

“Whose idea was that?”

“Hers. She insisted. She wants us to be safe.”

“And to get a report on all my doings too, no doubt,” I replied, with an uncharacteristic nastiness. Paul ignored this as he so often does my remarks in this tone. We shook hands, or I tried to shake hands, but he embraced me, something I don’t much care for. “It’s all going to work out fine,” he said, smiling with such a good humor that I was forced to allow my own face to break. I hate that about him. Mr. Brown, at least, was content with a brief shake, and then they were gone into the confusing British traffic.

My room was blue, elaborately upholstered the way the Dorchester does, tufts upon tufts, no swaggable space unswagged. I called Crosetti again, with the same result, had a scotch, and another, and made some business calls setting up appointments for the next several days. Our firm was representing a large multinational publisher and the meetings were about European Union handling of digitized text and the royalties pertaining thereto. It was exactly the sort of grindingly dull legal work I have specialized in, and I was looking forward to being as grinding and dull as I could manage with a group of colleagues compared with whom I am Mercutio.

Every so often during the next day I called Crosetti, with no luck. The first evening, after a dull supper with several international copyright lawyers, I briefly considered hiring one of the elegant prostitutes for which that part of London is justly famous, a leggy blonde, perhaps, or a Charlotte Rampling type with a sly smile and lying blue eyes. But I declined the tempt; I might have enjoyed the in-your-face defiance of Amalie’s unseen watchers (and their employer, of course), but against that I knew that it would not be particularly pleasurable and that I would be suicidally depressed afterward. This was a demonstration that I was not doomed always to take the most self-destructive option and it made me feel ridiculously pleased with myself. I slept like the just and the next morning at breakfast received a call from Crosetti.

When he said he was at Amalie’s place in Zurich I experienced a stab of rage and jealousy so intense that I almost upset my orange juice glass and at that same instant I recalled in detail my conversation with him at the bar of my former hotel. In the vile sexual phantasmagoria that my domestic life has become, I have never crossed a particular line, which I know is one that many philandering husbands flit by without a thought, and by this I mean projecting one’s sins upon the injured wife, either accusing her of infidelity or subtly encouraging a self-justifying affair. “Everyone does it” gets you off the moral hook, and then we can all be sophisticatedly depraved. Had I really encouraged Crosetti? Had he really taken me up on it? Had Amalie…?