The Book of Air and Shadows

of reach. Obviously, someone offered Bulstrode a manuscript. What if there were others in the bundle, and he declined to buy them?”
    “Impossible! He would’ve sold both his grandmothers for a package like that.”
    “Yes, but absent a bull market in grandmothers, how much would he have had to offer, say for just the Bracegirdle original?”
    “I don’t know…fifty grand, maybe, if the seller wanted instant cash. At auction, God knows what it would have fetched. Maybe twice that, three times…”
    “And did Bulstrode have that kind of cash?”
    “Hell, no. He was skinned by the lawyers over that phony
Hamlet
business. I had to advance him money on his salary when he came over here. Wait a minute…!”
    “Yeah, right. If he didn’t have serious money, how did he get hold of the manuscript? Two possibilities. Either he paid a far lower price to an owner who didn’t know what it was, in which case, when the seller was conned into thinking that the Bracegirdle wasn’t worth that much, and if he had the ciphers, he didn’t offer them to Bulstrode at all. Or, Bulstrode sees the whole package and the seller knows the real value and he wants major bucks for it. So why doesn’t Bulstrode go to the Folger? Or to his good pal Dr. Haas for that matter?”
    A bitter laugh here. “Because he knew I was broke too?”
    “Did he? But let’s say it was because the provenance is shaky. The seller is something of a crook himself, but he knows the value of these letters as a key to something even more gigantic. So Bulstrode goes to Mr. Big and sells him on a deal-help me buy the package and we’ll find the most valuable item on earth and-”
    “That’s ridiculous! I mean, sure, Andrew could have lowballed a naive seller, but he couldn’t possibly have known any Mr. Bigs. He hardly knew anyone in New York.”
    I thought about this and agreed that Mickey was probably right. Miranda had said much the same thing. I thought for a while and said, “Then there has to be a tertium quid.”
    “You mean someone who knew the value of what Bulstrode had and also knew gangsters? And wanted the big payoff. Are there people like that?”
    “Yes,” I said. “I’m a person like that. I know a distinguished professor of English literature, you, and I also know some hard boys. It’s probably not as uncommon as we’d like to believe. Stockbroker types never seem to have trouble finding a thug to knock off their wives. Or vice versa. In any case, Bulstrode may have gone to this person and confided that he had the Item within reach. This person, for whatever reason, lets the hard boys know about it. Bulstrode goes to England and comes back. He knows he’s being followed, so he stashes the package with me. Then the gangsters grab him and torture him enough to get my name out of him, which is why I’m in their sights and why Miranda was taken, and why they want to get their hands on the ciphers.”
    “Which neither she nor you have, since Bulstrode didn’t. Do we know they even exist?”
    “Mr. Tertium obviously does. Tell me, did Bulstrode ever mention to you the name of the person who sold him the manuscript?”
    “Never. Christ! Why
didn’t
he come to me? It would’ve been the easiest thing in the world to arrange a purchase at any reasonable price.”
    Here I told him what Miranda had related to me about Bulstrode’s shame over the fake
Hamlet
affair and the extent of his paranoia. Mickey shook his head. “That poor ass! God, he’d be alive now if he had. But, you know, it shouldn’t be all that hard to learn the name of the seller. Andrew had an appointment diary. Or he could’ve given the seller a check. The trouble is that his diary and checkbook are still being held by the cops.”
    “Yes. But there may be ways around that. It occurs to me that I’m the lawyer for the Bulstrode estate and the lawyer for its heiress. I’ll see whether the cops will let me examine that material.”

    And so on and so on. I’m fairly sure that’s where the idea of checking on who sold the papers came up. After I left Mickey, I received a call on my cell phone from Detective Murray returning mine of the previous night. He had, of course, heard about the break-in, theft, and abduction and wanted to talk to me. I concocted a story for him. There had been no abduction, I said. Ms. Kellogg had called me and said she was fine, that she had left the apartment before the assault, that she had the papers in her possession. They