The Book of Air and Shadows

enough lever to me. Meanwhile, what do you intend to do with your life? Do you think it’s likely you’ll really be disbarred?”
    “Maybe, if there’s a complaint from the heir. I’d have to make restitution, obviously…”
    “You ought to go see him.”
    “The heir? I can’t do that!”
    “Why not? Have a chat, tell him what happened, beat your breast and cry mercy. You know the trouble with you lawyers is that sometimes, in your efforts to be absolutely legal, you forget ordinary human intercourse. What can he do to you? Call you an asshole? You already know that. And maybe you’ll find out something about you-know-what. Maybe Andrew confided in his longtime companion. Anyway, you’ll have a nice talk. You were probably one of the last people to see his boyfriend alive-he’ll probably be grateful for the meeting. And you can return the personal effects. It’d be a nice gesture after your various peccadilloes.”
    Yes, it was definitely Mickey who first put it into my head to go to England and talk with Oliver March. Whether I would have gone or not was still in doubt when I left Mickey at the campus, but later events changed that. I felt somewhat better after my lunch. For some reason, virtually every Chinese restaurant in New York has a full bar, even joints that look like they don’t sell a martini a month. I had three, something I had never done at lunchtime before in my life.
    The remainder of the afternoon is somewhat blurry. Perhaps there was a discussion of marriage with Omar, me quizzing him on Muslim practices in this area. Was fidelity easier if you had two or three? I can’t recall his answer exactly. We went back to my loft and I had another drink, a scotch, and then a nap. From which I was awakened by the merry dinging of my cell phone, upon which I was sleeping. I punched the green button and it said “You jerk!” in my ear, by which I knew it was my brother.
    Clearly, he’d been talking to Amalie and Miri while I was eating and sleeping and had the whole story from both those angles and he let me know what he thought of my recent behavior. “Was that it?” I said after the blast had dissipated. “Because I have an appointment at a child brothel in twenty minutes.”
    This he ignored as it deserved, and said
    What does it matter what he said, exactly? I was blurred with drink and unpleasant sottish dreams and so I can’t really recall. I think we talked about Amalie and about her asking him to pull his thugs off the case and her plans to leave the country. I was probably rude to him as I so often am, for I have never quite forgiven him for turning out a better man than me, and also I was sick of being lectured by my family about my many defects. I may have asked him about our father, about whether he was connected in some way with Shvanov and his doings. He told me he didn’t know, but it was possible, if any scams were going down. What kind of scams?
    He said, this Shakespeare business, dummy. It has all the earmarks of a big con: the secret document, never authenticated and now lost, the priceless treasure, the dupe Bulstrode, the false heiress. It stank of fraud, and since it was a bunch of extremely dangerous gangsters who had been defrauded, it would be a wise move not to get involved any more and to get the word out that I was no longer a player. Something like that. Did I beg him to intercede with Amalie not to leave the country? I may have. As I said, it’s vague.
    Hideously clear, in contrast, is what happened during the remainder of my evening. My stomach was acting up, as it always does when I drink to excess during the day, so I made myself some poached eggs, toast, and tea, and around six or so had Omar drive me out to godforsaken Queens, to Ozone Park. It was dark when we arrived at a street of depressing little bungalows, all with vest pocket front yards protected by chain-link fencing and decorated with Madonnas and mirror balls on pedestals. It reminded me forcefully of my Brooklyn roots and my unhappy childhood. I was prepared not to like the inhabitants.
    My ring was answered by a thin woman with an Irish kisser and a head full of russet ringlets, wearing a black cotton crewneck and worn blue jeans. A nice freckled face but supplied with the kind of sharp blue eyes it would be hard to lie to. I introduced, we shook. This was Mary Crosetti, mother of. Into the living room: furnishings old, worn, reasonably well cleaned, a middle-class home such as I had been