The Book of Air and Shadows (5 page)

“I don’t know. It depends on what it is. And who wrote it, of course.” She held it up to the light. “Oh, I get it now. This sheet was printer’s copy. It’s got corrections on it in lead pencil. Interesting—so it became a book, probably printed by whoever did the Churchill books for John Walthoe.” She unweighted and opened the first volume and examined the imprint. “Peter Deane. We might as well change the blotters now.”

After this was done, Crosetti asked, “Aren’t you curious to know what book it was the manuscript for? What if the rest of the backing is from the same book? What if it’s someone famous, like, I don’t know, Donne or Milton or Defoe? A holographic manuscript from someone like that’d be worth a pile, no?”

“It’s probably the musings of an obscure clergyman. Commentaries on the Epistles.”

“But we don’t know that. Why don’t you open the other covers and see?”

“Because it’s more work. I’d have to make them right again. And I don’t have a lot of time.”

“We have time now,” he said, “watching the books dry. Come on, I’d consider it a favor. I’m doing
you
one.”

She gave him a flat blue stare, acknowledging the manipulation, he thought. “If it’ll make you happy,” she said and picked up her little spatula.

An hour later, Crosetti regarded with pleasure what looked like a line of washing hanging from strings he had rigged between the support columns that held up the roof of the loft. They were the damp folio pages that had served as backing in the six volumes, four sheets from each cover, forty-eight pages in all. For reasons that were not entirely clear to him, the discovery of manuscript pages that had not seen the light for over two and a half centuries made him less uneasy about what he knew
in his heart was participation in an act of fraud. He had rather shocked himself by how brazenly he had manipulated her into opening the covers to yield this manuscript, and he consequently desired that the papers hold some historical or literary importance. It was with great impatience that he waited for the sheets to be dry enough to handle.

In the meantime, the interleaving had to be changed on the hour. Rolly seemed content to let him do it unsupervised after she determined during the first few changes that he could manage it correctly. The main thing was to make sure not to rush the process by shoving in too many towels or interspersing the blotting medium between groups of fewer than ten leaves. If they did that, she’d explained, the book would swell out of shape and burst its bindings. Around six, Crosetti announced that he was hungry and learned that ramen noodles and take-out containers of varying ages constituted virtually all of her available foodstuffs. He could see why she went so often to lunch with Glaser. Crosetti ran out and braved the mean streets of Red Hook, returning with a couple of bottles of Mondavi red and a large pizza.

“You bought wine,” she said when he came in and placed the bag on the table. “I never buy wine.”

“But you drink it.”

“Oh, yes. This is very nice of you. Thank you.” Again that little wolf’s smile; number two.

Their employer made up the main subject of their table talk, as they otherwise had little in common. Crosetti’s interest in books as physical objects was as slender as hers in current films. Besides, he was curious about the old man, and Rolly was willing to supply information when pressed, the more so as the wine took effect. He liked watching her eat: she was ravenous, she ate as if the slices were about to be snatched away, she ate the crusts to the last crumb and licked her fingers while she spun out what she knew. The story was that Glaser had entered the trade from his life as a collector, a common progression. His family made its pile two generations ago in department stores, and he had been raised in the upper bourgeoisie of Manhattan. The Glasers had intellectual pretensions—opera boxes, concert tickets, European tours
à la mode, and the rest of it; a large apartment near Central Park had held a substantial library. In the course of time the ancestral emporiums had been absorbed by larger firms, the money not well invested, the inheritance scattered thinly among a too-numerous family. By the late 1970s Sidney Glaser had converted his hobby into his livelihood.

According to Rolly, he was not much of a businessman. Crosetti objected that the shop seemed to be a going concern, with many choice items.

“That’s just the problem. He’s got no business buying stuff like that McKenney and Hall for a hundred and fifty thousand. That’s for Baumann or Sotheby’s and the other big boys, and Glaser’s not a big boy. He’s got the clothes and the air but not the resources. Or the eye. Someone on his level should be picking up thousand-dollar books for two hundred, not hundred-thousand-dollar books for eighty-nine five. And they’re going to raise the rent—it already takes nearly half the average monthly profit—I mean paper profit—I doubt he’s made a real profit in years. It’s an old story in the book business. A rich collector thinks, I buy lots of books, why shouldn’t I pay for my hobby out of the profits?”

“Doesn’t it work?”

“On occasion. But like I said, you have to know your level, and work up. You can’t expect to start selling at the level you operated on as a rich collector, unless you’re willing to pour your own money into the business. And then it’s not really a business, is it? It’s a
more
expensive hobby, with pretensions. Speaking of which, the little New York East Side antiquarian dealer with the paneled shop—it’s a complete anachronism. There’s no way he can pay that rent and compete with
both
the Internet mail-order dealers and the big-name houses. Glaser’s going down. That fire was the best thing that could’ve happened to him. He’ll diddle the insurance companies on a couple of dozen select items, declare total losses, and sell them as fair to good. It’ll give him some operating capital again, but it won’t last long….”

“You think he started the fire?”

“No, he’s a book man. He’d never knowingly destroy a book. He was practically crying—you saw it—over that Churchill. But since there
was
a fire, he’s not above taking as much advantage of it as he can.”

“Just like you.”

She narrowed her eyes at him. “Yes, just like me. But at least I have an excuse, since I don’t live in an eighteen-room apartment on Park Avenue. I
need
money.” She poured herself more wine, drank a swallow, added, “And how about you, Crosetti? If those sheets you’ve got drying turn out to be the holograph of John Locke’s preface to Churchill, what’ll you do? Take them to Glaser and say, Oh, look what I found, Mr. G., something you can sell to the Widener for ten grand, and can I have a pat on the head?”

“It’s not Locke, if you’re right about it being a Jacobean hand.”

“Oh, now he’s literate, is he? I thought you were a computer nerd movie guy.”

“I read book catalogs.”

“Oh, right. But not books. You don’t even like books, do you?”

“I like them fine.” He examined her in the waning light and found a belligerent thrust to her jaw he hadn’t noticed before this, and a blurred, aggrieved look to her face.

“You’re not going to be a nasty drunk, are you, Carolyn?”

“I will if I want to. It’s my place.”

“Uh-huh. But I don’t have to stay here. My sheets look pretty dry. I could just take them and leave you to change the diapers on your baby every hour all night long.”

And he would have too, except that no sooner were these words out than she burst into tears, horrible, hopeless wails, and, like the decent guy he was, Al Crosetti went around and knelt by her chair and held Rolly while she shook and soaked his shoulder with her tears.

T
HE
B
RACEGIRDLE
L
ETTER
(2)

I
'm back from a tour of the grounds, nothing visible from any of the windows, and I don't really feel like wandering around out there again in that dark. It occurs to me that I am a perfect target sitting here at my laptop under a table lamp. I'm in the living room, I suppose you could call it, of this house. A lodge, really, built of actual logs in the traditional manner. There is this one large room on the first floor and three bedrooms on the upper floor, which one reaches by a stairway that leads to a kind of railed balcony above me. Then there's a garret-type thing in the roof peak you get to via a drop ladder. The servants used to sleep there, when they had them. The walls are all pickled pine, and there are bookcases built in and a nice stereo system and a fieldstone fireplace that is literally large enough to roast an ox. A small ox. I have a fire going now, made from the good supply of oak, birch, and pine stored in the woodpile outside the kitchen door. Moose heads and racks of deer antlers decorate the base of the balcony, proof that, as Mickey has informed me, the Haas men were mighty hunters back in the day. There's a full
kitchen with stone floors and a full array of ’50s appliances on the first floor, and a couple of baths. Mickey installed a hot tub on the deck outside, although it’s drained now. I got the impression he doesn’t use the place much, although when he was a kid the family came up here every summer. It was a rich-family thing to do, apparently. I’ve been here many times before. When we were both young studs we used to bring girls for romantic weekends.

To resume the story: Professor Bulstrode handed the package over, a thick envelope bound, as I say, in tape. I asked him what was in it, and he said that it was a manuscript dating from 1642. This is the Work? I asked. No, not at all. This was merely the evidence that the Work exists, the Bracegirdle screed. But not valuable in its own right? Not as such—of purely scholarly interest, he said, and here a note of even greater nervousness entered his voice as he pressed upon me the absolute necessity of keeping the information in this package entirely confidential. That was why he was securing it in this way. I assured him that it would be perfectly safe and free from any prying eyes. He appeared to relax at this assurance; I then buzzed for Ms. Maldonado and asked her for a standard representation letter and receipt for retainer.

While this was being prepared, I attempted to engage Professor Bulstrode in casual conversation. It did not flow. He kept eyeing the taped manila envelope as if it were a bomb, and it seemed to me that he could hardly wait to put distance between him and its menace. Finally, I asked him if he’d made a copy of the document inside, and he said he had not, for reasons of security, after which he drew from me a solemn assurance that I would make none either. Here I began to lose patience and I told him that I was starting to get a little uncomfortable with this air of secrecy. The point of hiring a lawyer, I said, was that it gave you someone to speak to confidentially, and that it was obvious that he wasn’t comfortable doing that, and that this in turn made me uncomfortable representing him. In my experience, I added, people act that way with their counsel when they are trying to pull off something shady. Perhaps it would be best for all concerned if he took back his check, no hard feelings, etc.

At this he broke out into fresh floods of sweat and his face became quite flushed. He assured me that he didn’t mean to make a mystery nor, of course, was there anything in the remotest sense illegal or shady about his situation. But in academic affairs involving unique items a certain reticence was usual. He begged my pardon if he’d offended. Here Ms. Maldonado popped in and dropped the agreement on my desk. I made no move to pick up the folder. She left. I said that perhaps we’d gotten off on the wrong foot. I wanted him to trust me. He said he did. I asked him to start again: who was Bracegirdle, what was in the envelope, and what was the Work it led to?

So he told his story: He’d come across the manuscript in the course of some research into trends in Renaissance philosophy. The ms. consisted of some twenty-six folio sheets, closely written, dated 1642. Richard Bracegirdle was nobody special, a soldier who died soon after the battle of Edgehill in the English Civil War. Most of the writing was of no interest, but there were indications that Bracegirdle had been hired to move the property of a nobleman named Lord Dunbarton. Both Bracegirdle and Dunbarton were on the Parliamentary side in the war, and Dunbarton’s estate was in territory controlled, or about to be controlled, by the Royalists. He feared confiscation of his valuables and muniments and so had engaged Bracegirdle to move them, including the rarest items in the library, to his London house. What happened, however, was that the Royalist forces moved on London, blocking his path. So he buried the treasure and sent Dunbarton a letter informing him where he’d buried the swag.

Buried treasure, said I, noncommittally, and I asked him what this had to do with intellectual property. The library, he said, the library.

I asked him what was in the library, if he knew.

He didn’t answer. Instead he asked me if I knew what the Leicester Codex was. As a matter of fact I did. One of the growing edges of the IP game is the digitization of books, manuscripts, and artworks, and the assignment and negotiation of the various rights thereto pertaining. Mr. William Gates, the software billionaire, is a major player in this field, and IP lawyers tend to keep themselves apprised of his many doings. I told Bulstrode that I knew that some ten years ago Gates had purchased
the Leicester Codex, one of Leonardo’s notebooks, for thirty million dollars.

At this, Bulstrode blurted out, Dunbarton had a
Shakespeare
manuscript. Can you imagine the value of such a thing? Now all reticence was gone, an odd little light shone in his mild eyes.

Those eyes were starting to positively bulge here, so I nodded amiably and said I supposed it would be worth a great deal, and with these words there struck the first pangs of that leaden claustral feeling I always get in the presence of a maniac. It is sadly not an unfamiliar one, for we IP lawyers are all too well-acquainted with the mad. No showbiz hit, no world-conquering diet book, no moneymaking product of the human imagination ever appears unaccompanied by a gang of shabby pretenders clutching greasy folders stuffed with documentary proof that they thought of it first. And they don’t want to hear that no one can copyright an idea, a concept. They don’t want to hear that ideas are like water or air or carbon, free for the taking, and the only thing from which loot can be wrenched by copyright is a particular
set
of words, or musical notes, or chemicals. I admit I had not had the Secret Document type before, but here he now was. I recall hoping that the poor bastard’s check was good.

So I waited for the florescence of the craziness: an outpouring of hectic enthusiasm about how important the lost manuscript was, what literary secrets it might reveal, its provenance, how close he was to cracking the secret code, but, somewhat to my surprise, he seemed to deflate after his revelation, and I thought that he was regretting having shared so much, and had already started to work me into his paranoia, yet another potential thief of his Precious.

We signed the forms and he left. I had Ms. M. zip downstairs and deposit the check and place the package in our safe-deposit box; and then, although I was feeling the belly rumbles of my delayed lunch, I turned to my computer and googled Andrew Bulstrode, and found a good deal more on Dr. B. than one might have expected on a simple academic. Five years ago, it appeared, Bulstrode had been a professor of English lit at Oxford, an expert on Shakespearean editions, and he had fallen prey to a man who turned out to be one of the great forgers of modern times.
Leonard Hastings Pascoe was a name that even I recognized. His specialty was early printing—incunabula—and manuscripts associated with significant authors, and he was very clever indeed. He claimed to have discovered a new bad quarto of
Hamlet
. A bad quarto is a sort of early literary piracy, in which printers would assemble a play from the memories of actors, and whatever actual scripts they could get hold of, and print it without the permission of the author.

This was apparently a major find, for (according to the googled articles) the publishing history of
Hamlet
is extremely complex. There is a First Quarto (bad) and a Second Quarto (good, or authorized by the author) and the First Folio, which Shakespeare’s friends and theatrical-business partners, Heminge and Condell, had assembled after his death, which is essentially the play we now know. The supposed new bad quarto had in it many intriguing differences from the authorized play and suggested a view into Shakespeare’s writing process. It was dated 1602, right after
Hamlet
was registered and a year earlier than the First Quarto, raising interesting questions: were the differences mere transcription errors or did they mean that the author had changed his play after it was performed? It was the sort of thing that generates multiple orgasms among the learned. The British Museum was offered first crack by the patriotic Pascoe, and they snapped at it for the asking price, provided that the distinguished expert Andrew Bulstrode vetted it as genuine.

Which he did. Pascoe had used genuine seventeenth-century paper and ox-gall-iron ink of the correct formulation and period (derived by chemical extraction from contemporary documents, to defeat any ink-aging tests) and his type fonts had been meticulously copied from one of the bad quartos in the Folger Library. The museum bought the thing for 850,000 pounds. Bulstrode had first dibs on it, of course, and within six months had produced a magisterial work, demonstrating that in his opinion the author had heavily rewritten the great play and that in fact the Pascoe Quarto, so called, was in actuality an important link among the various proto-Hamlets that Shakespeare had used as source texts. Sensation among the dons!

And it might have become part of the critical canon had not L. H. Pascoe delighted in delicious young fellows with smoky eyes and pouting lips, and having such a taste, not promised one of these a trip to Cap d’Antibes, and a new wardrobe with it, and having so promised, not reneged, causing the young fellow, naturally enough, to drop a dime on his patron. The police raided a certain industrial estate in Ealing and found the handpress and the paper and the ink, with the fake
Hamlet
still set up in the forms. This occurred some eighteen months after the sale.

The money from this had apparently been mostly spent on high living of a particularly lubricious kind. The tabloids ate it whole, reserving a special venom for the peccant expert, Bulstrode. Into this mess strode my old pal Mickey Haas, who defended his colleague in the public press as having made an error that any other expert in the world would have made, including Dr. Haas himself. He arranged for Bulstrode to occupy a visiting professorship at Columbia in the hope that England might cool down after an interval. And now it seemed someone else had unloaded a document on Bulstrode, which I thought odd, since he was the last person eligible to present any important manuscript to the world, and also the last person to want to. But I had long surrendered any notion that experience was an efficient teacher. I, for example, would still be happily married had I been able to learn from my mistakes.

Or perhaps he had snapped under the strain. Professors go batty too, perhaps more often than other people, although owing to their profession their madness is less often remarked. As a reality check I looked up Lord Dunbarton and, somewhat to my surprise, found he was no figment. Henry Reith (1570–1655), second Baron Dunbarton, was a Puritan grandee. His dad, the first Lord Dunbarton, had won his spurs as one of Henry VIII’s ransacking minions, a “visitor” as they called them, kicking nuns and monks out of their cloisters and making sure that the Protestant Reformation reached every lootable ecclesiastic property in England. He was rewarded with a title and an estate in Warwickshire, Darden Hall. The son was introduced at court late in Elizabeth’s reign, won the favor of Lord Burghley, and got into what they then called the “intelligencer” business, working to catch Jesuits and expose their knavish plots against
the queen’s and later King James’s peace. Under Charles I, he was a staunch Parliamentarian, having, like his father, a keen eye for the winning side, although he seemed also to be a sincere Puritan fanatic, energetically pursuing the recusants of Warwickshire. Darden Hall was occupied by Royalist troops during the brief campaign that ended at the battle of Edgehill. No mention of libraries, of Bracegirdles, of lost Shakespeariana. Now I thought that I should call Mickey Haas, to get the full story on the poor man, and I did, and was informed that Dr. Haas was at a conference in Austin and would not be back until the beginning of next week. So I went to lunch.

Here I consult my diary. Ms. Maldonado keeps my appointments, of course, and every Monday I get a sheet of paper telling me what I have for the week, but I transfer these appointments to a little leather-bound diary with blue tissue pages that I keep in the breast pocket of my shirt. I am not really what one could call absentminded, but I do get involved in the library sometimes or on the telephone, and unless I glance at this every so often I find that I miss meetings. This is how I knew it was the eleventh of October that I met Dr. B., and as I now consult it again, I learn that on the day I met Bulstrode I left work early to pick up Imogen and Nicholas at their school and take them to dinner and a movie. Wednesday evening is my official midweek appointment with my children and I also see them on alternate weekends and for two weeks in the summer.

Imogen, my daughter, is thirteen. She has straw blond hair and gray eyes and looks so like her mother that she might have been budded from the maternal stem instead of being generated by the usual method. This, by the way, seems to be a peculiarity of our family. The Mishkin genes do not work and play well with others. They either dominate totally or leave the field in a huff. Thus I look exactly like my dad, the Jewish refrigerator carton, while my brother and sister are blondie rails, recruiting posters for the
Hitlerjugend
. My son, Nicholas, aged eleven, is an absurd little Jake. When I was courting Amalie, my sister pointed out to me that she looked exactly like a younger version of our mom. I can’t say that I ever saw it, although the coloring and general facial type is similar. German, you could say. When Uncle Paul and Aunt Miri take Imogen
out, it is universally assumed that she is their daughter, while when I am with her the average passerby gives us unfriendly looks, as if I were an abducting perve.