The Book of Air and Shadows

turning into a nightmare…”
    “…or, if I may, I have a large loft downtown. There are two bedrooms in it where my kids stay when they’re on school holidays. You could have one of them. It’s probably nearly as grotty as the Marquis, but free of charge. I also have a driver to take you around town. He used to be sort of a bodyguard.”
    “A bodyguard?” she exclaimed and then asked, “Whom did he guard?”
    “Yasir Arafat, actually. But we like to keep that part quiet. I can’t think of anyplace you’d be more safe.” Except from me, but let that pass for the moment. Honestly, I was not thinking of that at all when I made the offer. I recalled the terror on her uncle’s face quite well and did not want that look ever to appear on hers. “Once you’re stashed, we can see if we can learn something about the people involved from their vehicle. I’ll alert the police to this development and leave that part to them.”
    She agreed to this plan after the usual polite demurrers. We left the reading room and then the library. At the top of the steps I steered her into the shadow of the porch columns and peered out at Fifth Avenue. There was no black SUV with smoked windows in sight. I called Omar on my cell and told him to meet us on the Forty-second Street side and then we hurried through Bryant Park and were waiting for the Lincoln as it pulled up.
    My loft is on Franklin Street off Greenwich. It’s four thousand square feet in area, and the building used to be a pants factory, later a warehouse, but now it is chockablock full of rich people. I got into it before downtown real estate became psychotic, but it still set me back a bundle, and that doesn’t count the improvements. We used to live here as a family, Amalie, the kids, and me, until she moved out. Usually the guy moves out, but Amalie knew I really liked this place and also she wanted to be closer to the kids’ school, which is on Sixty-eighth off Lexington. They’re all now on East Seventy-sixth in a brownstone duplex. We split expenses right down the middle, because she has a good income and sees no reason why I should be beggared simply because I am a sexual asshole.
    At the time under discussion, however, I was not thinking about that. I was showing Amalie 2 (aka Miranda Kellogg) around my dwelling. She was suitably impressed, which I found an improvement over Amalie 1, who was never impressed by things money could buy. I ordered Chinese takeout and we ate by candles at a low table I have from which you get a nice, if narrow, view of the river. I was a gentleman, and reasonably honest as we ate and exchanged histories. It turned out she was a child psychologist by training, working as a midlevel bureaucrat. We talked about Niko, my boy, and his problems. She was sympathetic in a rather distant way. As I became more familiar with her face, I decided that she did not resemble Amalie quite as much as I had originally thought, not feature by feature, but still there was that feeling of bubbling excitement when I looked at her. How little we know, how much to discover, from lover to lover, as the song has it.
    She began to yawn, and perfectly proper, I made up the bed in Imogen’s room. I gave her a new white T-shirt to sleep in, and of course I had fresh toothbrushes because of my kids. I got sleepy thanks and a nice kiss on the cheek. What was that perfume? Elusive, but familiar.
    The next day, we rose early, breakfasted on coffee and croissants, in a mood that was more companionable, I must admit, than it would have been had this been a Morning After. She had a certain distancing air about her that did not encourage aggressive intimacy seeking, which was fine with me: another reminder of Amalie back when. She dressed in the same little department-store wool suit she had worn the previous day, and Omar took us up to my office. Once there, I introduced her to Jasmine Ping, our brilliant estate lawyer, and left them to plumb the mysteries of probate and also help arrange for the transfer of Bulstrode’s body back to England.
    My diary tells me I spent the morning dissuading a writer from suing another writer for stealing her ideas and from them producing a far more successful book than the writer’s own, and later on the phone with a fellow at the U.S. Trade Representative setting up a meeting about (what else?) Chinese IP pirates. A typical morning. At twelve-thirty or so Miranda appeared up at my office and I suggested lunch. She