The Book of Air and Shadows

the mind, I believe, it is as transient as smell, although it can be brought back Proust-like by a recurrence of the original stimulus. I am a little batty now, and so I can recall fairly well my irrational desperation sitting half-naked in that wintergreen-smelling locker room. I had the cell phone in my hand and almost without thinking, I dialed Mickey Haas’s number. I left a message demanding that he contact me immediately and I must have sounded crazed because he rang me back about twenty minutes later, while I was waiting at the curb for Omar to bring the car around.
    “Lunch?” I said when he was connected.
    “This is a lunch call? You sounded like your pants were on fire.”
    “It’s a desperate lunch call. I’m being chased by Russian gangsters. I really need to talk to someone.”
    “Okay. I had something with my publisher, but I can cancel. You’ll send Omar?”
    “I’ll come up. We’ll go someplace new.” Of course
they
would be watching my usual haunts…
    We went to Sichuan Gardens on Ninety-sixth, somewhat to Mickey’s amusement. The place is dim and on the second floor of a commercial block, and I sat with my back to the mirrored wall where I could watch the entryway. To fine my alertness to an even higher degree I had a martini.
    “So, Lefty,” he said when we had ordered, “you think Big Max got a contract out on you?”
    “This is not funny, man,” I said. “This is not supposed to be my life.”
    “No, your life is supposed to be long dull days at the office doing work you don’t particularly like, whose purpose is to render the creative act even more of a commodity than it already is. And chasing pussy in your off hours, looking for the romantic fix that will stay fixed, even though you already found it years ago, and if you did once again convince yourself you found Miss Perfecto, you’d go off chasing pussy again as soon after the wedding as you possibly could, a dreary cycle that will end only when you locate someone sturdy, reliable, and mercenary who will stick around to nurse you through your final illness and collect all the chips.”
    “Thank you for your support, Mickey,” I said as icily as I could. “And fuck you very much.”
    “Whereas now,” he continued, undismayed, “you’re living the life of a man, every moment rich with import, with danger and excitement. A Shakespearian life, you could say, a life worthy of Richard Bracegirdle. Would you want Hamlet to go back to college and join a frat? Get drunk and party and get a B minus in Scholasticism 101?”
    “Doesn’t he get killed at the end of the play?”
    “He does, but don’t we all? The choice is only how we live in the previous five acts. Have you come any closer to finding the Bracegirdle original, speaking of spine-tingling excitement?”
    “No, and I don’t intend to,” I snarled, since I was being frank with Mickey and did not require any sympathy from him, did not care if he thought I might be in danger, which is why I had mendaciously suggested this possibility to my wife. “I want to have nothing to do with Bracegirdle apart from insuring that Russian gangsters or whoever is after the ciphers leaves me the fuck alone. What about you? Have you penetrated the mysterious manuscript any since I saw you last?”
    “No, and I don’t intend to,” he echoed. “Giving something like that to a scholar is like giving a glossy photo of a roast beef dinner to a starving man. It’ll make his mouth water but is devoid of nourishment. Without the original, as I think I’ve said, the text itself is a nullity. Never mind a putative letter from a guy who spied on the man, I could whip up a convincing facsimile of Shakespeare’s personal diary in a spare afternoon, answering questions that have plagued scholars for years. What Russian gangsters?”
    Now the whole thing emerged in a rush-Miranda, Amalie, Russians, the law firm, and all. Mickey chopsticked up his spicy beef with buckwheat noodles and listened quietly, as for years I have depended on him to do, as he has on me. When I ran out of words, I asked him for his opinion and suggested that he not just tell me I was fucked up, because I already knew that.
    He said, “You’re going to see this Crosetti kid with the ciphers?”
    “Yeah, but they think I’m going there to dicker about returning the original that Bulstrode screwed him out of. I have absolutely no leverage on him, except money.”
    “That’s always seemed to be a decent