The Book of Air and Shadows

cheap sneakers on his feet. The poor relation? He was reading the morning’s
New York Times
, scanning it really, as if the news bored him, or he knew what it was going to say already. Crosetti appreciated the feeling; this was how he himself read the paper, except for the movie reviews. He wondered if the man were an actor, a terrific-looking guy really, and wondered too at the genetics that had cranked out this one and Mishkin from the same batch.
    Suddenly the man snapped the paper shut, folded it, and jammed it into a seat pocket. He turned to Crosetti and said, “I’ve lost the ability to distinguish truth from fiction in the news, with the exception of the scores in sports. I don’t know why I bother. It just makes me angry without a reasonable outlet.”
    “You could tear the paper into shreds and stamp on the scraps.”
    The man smiled. “I could, but that sounds like something my brother might do.”
    “He has a temper. That cell phone business?”
    “Yes, and killing two people. But the strange fact is he
doesn’t
have a temper. He’s the mildest, longest-suffering guy in the world.
I’m
the one in the family with a temper.”
    “Could’ve fooled me.”
    “Yeah, but he’s not himself,” said the brother. “Violence sometimes does that. I saw it in the army a lot. People construct a persona, a mask, and they come to believe that it’s really them, down to the core, and then events happen that they never expected and the whole thing just cracks off, leaving their tender pulpy insides exposed to the harsh elements.”
    “Like post-traumatic stress?”
    The man made a dismissive gesture. “If you buy psychobabble. It suits the culture to dump a whole set of unrelated symptoms suffered by completely different kinds of people as a result of completely different kinds of events into a box with that phrase on the label. It’s about as useful and as intellectually valid as stamp collecting. My brother lived a tightly controlled existence that, while enormously successful, was cut off from the wellsprings of life by addiction. He was living a lie, as the saying goes, and such lives are in fact fairly fragile. There is no real resilience in them.”
    “What’s he addicted to?”
    “My, you’re a nosy fellow.” This was said not unkindly, and Crosetti grinned.
    “Guilty. It’s a bad habit. I excuse it by saying it’s because I want to plumb the depth of the human condition for my work.”
    “Oh, right, you’re the screenwriter. Jake mentioned something about that. Plumb your own depths then. What do you think of Tarantino?”
    “Not a plumber of depths,” said Crosetti and imitated the other man’s dismissive gesture. “What’re you doing in Europe?”
    “Family business.”
    “Connected to all this? I mean the paper chase, the secret manuscript…?”
    “Indirectly.”
    “Uh-huh. You’re a lawyer too?”
    “I’m not.”
    “You know, if you want to keep stuff mysterious, the way to do it is not to make cryptic comments but to adopt a fictitious and boring persona. James Bond always said he was a retired civil servant and that usually closed out the conversation. Just a tip from the world of movies.”
    “Okay. I’m a Jesuit priest.”
    “That works for me. I think we’re departing. We didn’t even get a safety demonstration. Is that because they don’t care or because no one can conceive of any misfortune befalling the ruling classes?”
    “The latter, I think,” said Paul. “It’s hard to remain rich without developing a defect in the sympathetic imagination.”
    Crosetti had never experienced a quicker takeoff. The engines strained briefly, the cabin tilted back like a La-Z-Boy, and they were above the clouds in what seemed like a few seconds.
    When the plane was flying level again, Crosetti said, “I assume you know the whole story thus far. I mean about the Bracegirdle letters and the cipher and all that.”
    “Well, I’ve read the letter and Jake told me a little of what you’ve learned about the nature of the cipher.”
    “What do you think?”
    “About our chances of interpreting it and finding this supposed lost play? Negligible. I mean we’d need the actual grille according to you, and what are the chances of a piece of perforated paper surviving for nearly four hundred years? And how would we even recognize it? And no cipher, no play-that seems fairly clear.”
    “So why are you here?”
    “I’m here because since this letter emerged, my brother