The Book of Air and Shadows

Bridger.”
    “I’m sorry…?”
    “A felon my mom once went out with for a while, who I don’t want to talk about right now. Anyway, I spotted him for a bad guy right away, but poor Bulstrode didn’t have a clue, and for sure I wasn’t going to tip him off. He did his little pitch about the Shakespeare play to Shvanov. He said the Bracegirdle document itself was worth fifty to a hundred grand, but if we found the Shakespeare manuscript, there was no way to calculate how high the price would go. A hundred million? A hundred fifty? And Shvanov would risk nothing because even if we came up empty on that, he’d still have the Bracegirdle to sell. Anyway, Shvanov gave him twenty large and told him to take off for England immediately to research Bracegirdle and Lord Dumbarton and get on the trail of the play. Which he did. And I went with him-”
    “Without a good-bye. Don’t you think that was a little harsh?”
    “That was the best thing about it, knowing you weren’t ever going to be involved with that son of a bitch.”
    “You were
protecting
me?”
    “I thought I was,” she admitted, and then added defensively, “and don’t think you didn’t need it. You don’t know this guy.”
    “Speaking of whom-how did a Brit scholar happen to know a thug like Shvanov anyway?”
    “I have no idea. A mutual friend hooked them up. I thought it was some loan shark deal-Bulstrode was stony broke and maybe he tried to raise money on the street for this thing and it led him up the chain. God, I’m so tired! Where was I?”
    “Leaving on a jet plane, don’t know when you’ll be back again. And no good-byes.”
    “Right. Okay, we get to England and go straight to Oxford and we stay with Ollie March. Bulstrode said I had to stay with them, which March didn’t much like, but he said it was for security. I had to get the manuscript dated, so no one would know Bulstrode was involved, and when the dating came back positive, that’s when he really got squirrelly. I wasn’t allowed to make phone calls, and the only reason I got to write that letter to Sidney was I convinced him that it would be more suspicious not to write and make up a story about the plates and send him a check. He was insanely suspicious of me, that I was, like, working for Shvanov and telling him what we were up to, our research and all.”
    “But you weren’t.”
    “But I was. Of
course
I was working for Shvanov. I’m
still
working for Shvanov, as far as Shvanov knows. He gave me a cell phone before I left New York and told me to keep in touch. What was I supposed to say to a man like that? No?”
    Crosetti was silent under her defiant look. She snatched the towel from her head and dried her hair so violently that he winced. After a moment, he asked her, “What did Bulstrode say when you told him about the ciphered letters?”
    Here she blushed again. “I didn’t tell him. Shvanov did.”
    “But you told Shvanov.”
    “I confirmed his suspicions,” she admitted quickly. “He knows things, Crosetti. He has people everywhere. Obviously he knew about you from Bulstrode, and he must have checked around. You don’t think he can find out what’s happening at the New York Public Library? He can find out what’s happening in the CIA, for Christ’s sake!”
    “So much for keeping me out of it,” he said.
    “I’m sorry. I’m a coward and he scares me. I can’t lie to him. Anyway, when Bulstrode got the news about the ciphers, he went ballistic. I had to practically sit on him to calm him down. He realized that the ciphers were the key to finding the play manuscript and if Shvanov got hold of them from you, then he wouldn’t need
us
anymore, which was probably not that good for our health. I said we should try to see if the fair copies of the ciphers Bracegirdle sent to Dunbarton were still in existence at the receiving end.”
    “That’s why you went to Darden Hall.”
    “Right. But they weren’t there, or anyway we didn’t find them. We did find a Breeches Bible, though. Do you know what that is?”
    “Yeah,” said Crosetti, “a small Tudor Bible, 1560, nine by seven. We think it was the basis of the Bracegirdle cipher. But how did you know that? You didn’t have the ciphertext.”
    “No, but we found a Breeches Bible with pinholes in it, in Dunbarton’s library, pinholes through random letters. Bulstrode figured out that the selected letters were the cipher key and that a grille must have been part of the cipher. He knew