The Book of Air and Shadows

extreme southern end of Lake Henry. There is a detailed hydrographic chart of the lake framed on the living room wall, and on it you can see that it was originally two lakes. Around 1900, the summering plutocrats who owned the land dammed an outlet and the water rose and left a string of islands extending out from the eastern shore, an excellent place to play pirates, Mickey has informed me, but you can’t drive a boat of any size between them because of hidden rocks. You get to this house either via New Weimar and a long slow drive down a third-rate road and a further drive on a gravel one (which is what I did) or you can get off the thruway at Underwood and take a short drive on a good road to the town of Lake Henry at the lake’s extreme northern tip and get into your mahogany speedboat and, after a twelve-mile jaunt, arrive in more style, which is the route Mickey and his family almost always traveled. The land route is actually shorter by a little over an hour, but a lot less comfortable. If I were a stylish sort of thug, I would rent or buy a motor craft, come south from the town, whack my guy, and then on the way back dump the corpse, suitably weighted, into the lake, which is nearly sixty feet deep at its greatest depth, not quite farther than did ever plummet sound, but deep enough.

    Examining my diary for the following day I find that the morning meetings are scratched out and I remember that I called in after a nearly sleepless night and spoke with Ms. Maldonado. I asked her to cancel these appointments and reschedule them and asked her one important question, to which the answer was yes. Ms. Maldonado makes two copies of absolutely everything, she is the Princess of Xerox, and it turned out that she had indeed made copies of the Bracegirdle manuscript. Then Omar called me begging to be rescued from the hospital, so I went and got him. He took the wheel gladly, looking in his white medical turban more like his desert ancestors than he usually did. As he proudly informed me, he had another gun; I did not wish to inquire further.
    At my direction, we picked up the Bracegirdle copies at my office and proceeded north on the East River Drive to Harlem. Although I questioned him again about the previous night’s events, he could add nothing, except an apology for having been cold-cocked and losing his charge. He could not imagine how someone had got into the loft and into position to surprise him in that way, and neither could I-another mystery added to those already accumulated in this affair.
    Our destination that morning was a group of tenement buildings on 151st Street off Frederick Douglass Boulevard that my brother, Paul, owns, or rather operates, since he doesn’t officially own anything. He picked them up as burned husks at a tax sale some years ago when buildings of this type were burning almost daily and has renovated them into what he refers to as an urban monastery. Paul is a Jesuit priest, a perhaps surprising revelation, since the last time I mentioned him he was a jailed thug. He is still something of a thug, which is why I went to visit him after Miranda disappeared. He has a profound understanding of violent evil.
    I suppose that one of the great shocks of my life was the discovery that Paul was smart, probably smarter than me in many ways. Many families assign roles to their members, and in our family Miriam was the dumb beauty, I was the smart one, and Paul was the tough one, the black sheep. He never did a day’s work in school, dropped out at seventeen, and as I mentioned, did a twenty-six-month jolt in Auburn for armed robbery. You can imagine the fate of a handsome, blond, white boy in Auburn. The usual choice is to be raped by everyone or raped exclusively by one of the big yard bulls. Paul chose the latter course as being healthier and safer and submitted to this fellow’s attentions until he had fashioned a shank, whereupon he fell upon the yard bull one night while he slept and stabbed him a remarkable number of times (although fortunately not quite to death). Paul spent the rest of his prison time in solitary, along with the child molesters and Mafia informants. He became a reader there, which I know about because every month I used to make up a package of books for him in response to his requests. In two years I observed in amazement his progression from pulp fiction, to good fiction, to philosophy and history, and finally theology. By the time he made parole he was reading