The Book of Air and Shadows

a particular line, which I know is one that many philandering husbands flit by without a thought, and by this I mean projecting one’s sins upon the injured wife, either accusing her of infidelity or subtly encouraging a self-justifying affair. “Everyone does it” gets you off the moral hook, and then we can all be sophisticatedly depraved. Had I really encouraged Crosetti? Had he really taken me up on it? Had Amalie…?
    Here I felt the moral universe tremble; my face broke out in sweat and I had to loosen my collar button to drag enough air into my lungs. In the sickening moment I understood that my excesses were made possible only because my mate was the gold standard of emotional honesty and chastity. If
she
were proved corrupt then all virtue would drain from the world, all pleasure become dross. It is hard to express now the real violence of this perception. (And, of course, like many such, it soon faded; this is the power of what the church calls concupiscence, the force born of habit-and the Fall of Man, if you want to get theological-that drags us back into sin. An hour later I was both mooning about Miranda and giving the eye to a fresh young assistant at my first meeting.)
    After some long seconds, I rasped into the instrument, “Are you fucking my wife, you guinea son of a bitch?” quite loud enough to turn heads at nearby tables in the Dorchester’s elegant breakfast room.
    To which he answered, in a shocked tone, “What? Of course not. I’m with Carolyn Rolly.”
    “Rolly? When did she turn up?”
    “In Oxford. She’s on the lam from Shvanov’s people.”
    “And you decided to shelter her with my wife and
children
, you asshole!”
    “Calm down, Jake. I thought it was a good move. Why should they look for her in Zurich? Or me, for that matter? Meanwhile, there’ve been some developments…”
    “I hate this! Get out of there and go someplace else!” Incredibly stupid, I know, but the idea of Crosetti sharing a house with Amalie got under my skin.
    “Fine, we’ll stay at a hotel. Look, do you want to hear this…it’s important.”
    Grumpily, I told him to spit it out. It was quite a story. The long and short was that Rolly had smuggled a copy of the grille away from the bad guys and they had been able to decipher the spy letters. I am trying to recall what I felt when I heard this and I suppose the answer is, not that much, because I knew the whole thing was a fraud. I told him to e-mail me a copy of the decipher and asked, “So, does it locate the play?”
    “It says he buried his copy, and waits for an answer from Rochester. He was double-crossing Dunbarton and wanted to use the play as proof of the plot. He may have gotten his answer and dug up the play and then who knows what happened to it?”
    “Wait a second-one of the ciphered letters was to someone else?”
    “Yeah, the Earl of Rochester, the man Dunbarton was conspiring against. Dunbarton apparently got caught plotting and decided to cover his tracks by whacking both Bracegirdle and the Bard. Bracegirdle panicked and tried to rifle the playhouse strongbox to fund his getaway, got caught, confessed all to Shakespeare, and they decided to blow the whistle. There’re some pages missing from this letter but it’s still pretty clear. Shakespeare knew some high-level people who could vouch for the whole thing and they wrote the letter in the same cipher.”
    “And they weren’t afraid that Dunbarton might get hold of it and read it?”
    “No, that’s the beauty of his cipher: all you needed was a grille, which is easy to copy, and a reference to a page in the Breeches Bible and you’re all set, but unless you have the page to start on you’re out of luck. He must’ve hand-delivered the grille, the ciphered letter, and the page reference to one of Rochester’s people and…”
    I didn’t care about the details and said so, adding, “So we still don’t have the whereabouts of the play?”
    “No. He wrote that he has the directions where they’ll be safe, whatever that means. Apparently you also need that range finder he invented.”
    “Oh, good. I’ll check out Portobello Road. So that’s it? A dead end.”
    “It looks like it, boss, unless someone has retained a trove of Bracegirdliana. On the other hand, this is still the biggest find for Shakespeare scholarship since forever. It should be worth a bundle to the Folger.”
    “Yes. And what are your plans now?”
    “Back to New York, I guess. Carolyn owns