The Book of Air and Shadows

What about Bulstrode and whoever sent the people I shot? They get a free pass?”
    “That’s up to you, Jake. You’re an officer of the court, I’m not. My only interest is in making sure this whole mess goes away.”
    The car was now moving in the direction of Oxford, and Mr. Brown informed us that we had been followed to the prison and were still being followed. Paul was pleased at this, as it would confirm to the bad guys that we had actually been to see Pascoe and would add an important detail to our forgery story. What was I thinking of after these revelations? I was plotting about how to use them to secure another meeting with Miranda Kellogg or whoever she was. I have described my Niko as an obsessive-compulsive, and he is, poor little guy, but, you know, the apple does not fall far from the tree.
    I pulled out my cell phone and dialed, not because I particularly wanted to speak with Crosetti, but as what psychologists call a displacement activity. Animals, for example, lick their genitals when placed in anxious situations, but higher animals reach for a ciggie or, latterly, their cell phones. I was annoyed to receive a recorded message that the cell phone customer I was trying to reach was unavailable. Was the man really so stupid as to have turned off his phone? I disconnected and made another call, booking a suite at the Dorchester: for people like me spending lots of money is another sort of displacement activity. During this ride, we managed to transfer the recording of the conversation we’d had with Pascoe to my laptop and thence to a CD, which Paul took. I forbore to ask.
    They dropped me off at the hotel some hours afterward. The atmosphere in the car had been fairly chilly and unrelieved by any dramatic confrontations. We discussed security. Mr. Brown assured us that his people would be watching over me in the city as well.
    “This must be costing a fortune,” I observed.
    “It is,” said Paul, “but you’re not paying for it.”
    “What? Surely not the law firm?”
    “No. Amalie is.”
    “Whose idea was that?”
    “Hers. She insisted. She wants us to be safe.”
    “And to get a report on all my doings too, no doubt,” I replied, with an uncharacteristic nastiness. Paul ignored this as he so often does my remarks in this tone. We shook hands, or I tried to shake hands, but he embraced me, something I don’t much care for. “It’s all going to work out fine,” he said, smiling with such a good humor that I was forced to allow my own face to break. I hate that about him. Mr. Brown, at least, was content with a brief shake, and then they were gone into the confusing British traffic.
    My room was blue, elaborately upholstered the way the Dorchester does, tufts upon tufts, no swaggable space unswagged. I called Crosetti again, with the same result, had a scotch, and another, and made some business calls setting up appointments for the next several days. Our firm was representing a large multinational publisher and the meetings were about European Union handling of digitized text and the royalties pertaining thereto. It was exactly the sort of grindingly dull legal work I have specialized in, and I was looking forward to being as grinding and dull as I could manage with a group of colleagues compared with whom I am Mercutio.
    Every so often during the next day I called Crosetti, with no luck. The first evening, after a dull supper with several international copyright lawyers, I briefly considered hiring one of the elegant prostitutes for which that part of London is justly famous, a leggy blonde, perhaps, or a Charlotte Rampling type with a sly smile and lying blue eyes. But I declined the tempt; I might have enjoyed the in-your-face defiance of Amalie’s unseen watchers (and their employer, of course), but against that I knew that it would not be particularly pleasurable and that I would be suicidally depressed afterward. This was a demonstration that I was not doomed always to take the most self-destructive option and it made me feel ridiculously pleased with myself. I slept like the just and the next morning at breakfast received a call from Crosetti.
    When he said he was at Amalie’s place in Zurich I experienced a stab of rage and jealousy so intense that I almost upset my orange juice glass and at that same instant I recalled in detail my conversation with him at the bar of my former hotel. In the vile sexual phantasmagoria that my domestic life has become, I have never crossed