The Book of Air and Shadows

near silence, although she did tell me that Nerd-Boy had spent the last week or so printing out page after page of genealogical data, so much so that nobody else (that is, Imogen) could use the printer and would I make him stop, Mom gives him everything he wants. I said I would talk to him about it and when we got to Amalie’s I did.
    I suppose I had nearly forgotten the task I had set Niko, what with all the excitement, but as I have learned to my sorrow, my son makes regular obsessive-compulsives look like fairies dancing on the beached margent of the sea. I found him up in the computer room arranging sheets of paper on the long trestle table we have there, lining up each sheet precisely square, with all the rows and columns having the same spacing between them. I watched him doing this for a while before I said, “Niko? Imogen says you found something for me. On Bracegirdle?”
    “Yes, I did,” said Niko. One of the advantages of hiring a search firm for something like this is that they come in, give you the best answer they found, take their check, and split. But when you ask Niko for an answer, you get the whole story, in
exhaustive
detail, from the very first effort, with descriptions of the logic involved, plus all the various strategies adopted, sources consulted, false leads exposed, and every last discovered fact displayed. Being a normal human, I will here summarize: Our Bracegirdle had a son, also named Richard, who survived and married and had seven children, of whom five survived into adulthood, and all married and had children. The males tended toward the sea or the army and rose in status to officer rank in the late seventeenth century and through the eighteenth. A Bracegirdle commanded a battery in Wolfe’s army on the Plains of Abraham outside Montreal and another was a captain of fusiliers at Plessy. There were whalers and slavers too, and the bottom line was that the last male descendant of our Richard passed away without issue in 1923, from wounds suffered in the Great War.
    Okay, a good idea that didn’t pan out: I was perhaps thinking of a family trove, a box of old papers in the attic that might just happen to be a Shakespeare play that no one knew about. I looked at my son and his useless work and felt a pang of sorrow, and felt also like hugging him, but knew better.
    I said, “Well, too bad, Niko. It was worth a try. Have you seen any Russian gangsters hanging around?”
    “No. There are two pairs of black guys hanging around. One drives a white Ford Explorer New York license HYT-620 and the other drives a green Pacer, New York license IOL-871. I haven’t finished with the descendants. I just said the males.”
    “There are females?”
    “Yes. On average, half of all offspring are females. Three of Richard Bracegirdle’s son Richard’s children were female. The eldest, Lucinda Anne, married Martin Lewes in 1681…”
    And off we went. I did not pay much attention, I have to say. Being with Niko is often like sitting near a rushing brook, oddly soothing. I was thinking about my coming meeting with the Russian, and also about my crack-up in the afternoon and also about where my next sexual encounter was going to come from, and under all of it was the great pulsing wound of Miranda Kellogg. Niko’s narrative reached its end. He picked up the various neat stacks of paper and carefully stapled them together. He said I had to take them away because his mother said he had too much stuff in his files and he was no longer interested in Bracegirdle genealogy. He turned to his screen, slipped on his headset, and left the building. I found a big envelope, stuffed the papers in it, and left too. I did not see or seek out Amalie, although I was aware of her presence in the house, like a rumor of war.

    Rasputin’s is a small chain of semi-fast-food joints started by a couple of Russian immigrants, one of innumerable efforts to find the next pizza. They serve a variety of piroshki, borscht, Russian pastries, and strong tea in tall glasses. The decor is Ye Olde Soviet Union: socialist realist posters, tile floors, servers in peasant blouses and long skirts, steaming samovars, and chunks of Red militaria artfully arranged. The menus are in faux Cyrillic, with the Rs printed backward, and so on. Omar dropped me off at the only one in Manhattan, on Lafayette Street, at five of ten and lurked in the Lincoln on the curb outside, in case our gangster tried any rough stuff.
    It was fairly pleasant