The Book of Air and Shadows

rich people, unholy liaisons…still, they couldn’t keep the snarkiness out of their voices. I imagined they were searching for some witty remark, of the sort that the scriptwriters used to put in the mouth of Jerry Orbach on the old
Law & Order
. They wanted to know who Omar was and where he came from and what was his relationship with the missing woman; and there was Omar’s pistol to explain, and my idea of the threat against Ms. Kellogg and what had happened out on the street with the maybe Russian thugs. Ms. Kellogg was staying here with you? Why wasn’t she at a hotel? Was she your girlfriend, Mr. Mishkin?
    No, she was not; no, I did not know why anyone would have taken her; they only wanted the manuscript. Why did they want the manuscript, Mr. Mishkin? Was it very valuable? Not as such, but some people thought it could lead to something very valuable. Oh, like a treasure map? Here the eye rolling started, the smirking. And here I said something like, “You can smirk all you want to, but a man was tortured to death to reveal the whereabouts of that thing, and now a woman has been kidnapped, and you’re still treating the whole thing as a joke.” And then we had a discussion about Professor Bulstrode.
    In fairness, this was the sort of thing that urban police detectives rarely encounter. They
wanted
it to be a domestic with elements of rich-guy looniness. The police covered surfaces with black fingerprint powder, took many photos, took Omar’s gun and samples of the blood he had shed in my service, and left, saying they would be in touch. As soon as they were gone I went out myself, to the garage on Hudson where Rashid had parked the Lincoln, and drove to St. Vincent’s Hospital to check on Omar. I was unsurprised to see the two detectives there, and I couldn’t get in to see him until they had finished extracting the nothing he knew. The hospital wanted to keep him overnight for observation because of the concussion, and so I left him with the assurance that I would contact his family and that he must not worry about the expenses.
    I made that unpleasant call from my cell phone and I was just putting it away when it buzzed again and it was Miranda.
    “Where are you? Are you all right?” was naturally (and stupidly) the first thing out of my mouth, although I knew she could not answer the first question and that the answer to the second was dreadfully patent.
    “I’m fine.” In a voice that was not fine at all.
    “Where are you?”
Stupid!
    “I don’t know. They put a bag over my head. Look, Jake, you can’t call the police. They said I should call you and tell you that.”
    “All right, I won’t,” I lied.
    “Is Omar all right? They hit him…”
    “Omar is fine. What do they want? They have the goddamned letter-why did they have to take you?”
    “They want the other letters, the ones written in cipher.”
    “I don’t understand-I gave you everything that your uncle gave me. I don’t know anything about any cipher.”
    “No, they were there in the original find. There’s a woman here, Carolyn-I think they’re holding her too…”
    “A Russian?”
    “No, an American. She says that there were coded letters in the package but someone didn’t deliver them like they were supposed to.”
    “Who didn’t?”
    “It’s not important. These people say they own the documents, they say they paid my uncle cash for them, a lot of cash, and that he tried to cheat them. Jake, they’re going to…”
    Actually it’s too painful to try and reconstruct this dialogue. We were both yelling into the phone (although I am ordinarily careful never to raise my voice into a cell phone as so many of my fellow citizens do, so that the streets often appear to be taken over by the mad; and I often wonder what the truly mad think of this) and someone cut her off in midsentence. The burden of the conversation was clear; unless I came up with some ciphered letters mentioned by Bracegirdle they would handle her as they had her uncle, and also that, if they thought that the police were involved, they would dispose of her instantly.

    Gunshots in the fog, three flat, concussive noises from the lake, and there is definitely the sound of a motor craft, an insectile buzz that sounds as if it comes from a long way off. Hunters? Is this duck season? I have no idea. In case not, I have just reloaded and cocked my pistol, a comforting activity I find. I should have said before this that Mickey’s cabin is at the