The Book of Air and Shadows

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,