The Book of Air and Shadows

to let her out of his sight, and I cut short his eager description of how well armed he was. I didn’t want to know. At the office, I called Detective Murray and related what had happened the previous night. He asked if I had the license plate of the car and I said I hadn’t and he said he didn’t see that there was much that he could do about the loss of a briefcase, and he’d transfer me to an officer who’d give me a case number for my insurance. I got a little steamed at that and pointed out that this incident must be related to the murder of Andrew Bulstrode, which he was supposed to be investigating, and there was a pause on the line after which the detective asked with heavy patience how I figured that. And then I told him about Ms. Kellogg and how someone with an accent was trying to get an old manuscript from her, one that Bulstrode had owned, and how the men who had attacked us had spoken in what seemed like Russian, and it had to be all connected. He asked me what this manuscript was worth and I told him Bulstrode had bought it for a couple of thousand dollars, but…
    And here I checked, because all beyond that was speculation, all the Shakespeare business, and I knew how it would sound to a New York cop, and so I concluded the conversation rather lamely and suffered being put on hold and, when at last unheld, reported the petty mugging to a bored man and received my case number. Then I called J. Ping and got the scoop on the status of Bulstrode’s will, with which she saw no obvious trouble, perfectly straightforward, a month should see it through surrogate’s court, and asked me if there was any big rush on, and I said, no, quite the contrary, no rush at all. The decedent’s body, I learned, was due to be flown out that day, in care of one Oliver March, presumably the longtime companion I had heard about.
    I skipped lunch that day, my diary says, and went to the gym, although it was not my regular gym day. I wished to talk to someone about Russians, and the gym was as good a place to do that as I had at my disposal. When I arrived, however, it was Arkady who wanted to talk to me. He took me into his tiny office, a cluttered industrial-carpeted place with hardly room for a desk and a few chairs, which desk was nearly invisible under a mass of lifting magazines and defective lumps of gear and samples of diet supplements, some of them even legal for use in Olympic events. There was a glass case in the office holding Arkady’s remarkable array of medals and cups-the old U.S.S.R. certainly did not stint its darlings-and the walls were plastered with many more triumphant photos than I owned myself. Arkady Demichevski is squat and hairy, with deep-set small brown eyes and a twenty-inch neck. He looks like an early hominid but is a civilized, cultured, and kind man, with a good sense of humor. Today he was uncharacteristically solemn.
    “Jake,” he said, “we need talk.”
    I indicated that he had the floor, and noted that he could not seem to meet my eye. “Jake, you know I don’t care what peoples who come to my gym do on outside. Is their life, yes? They behave in gym, they could stay, if not…” Here he tossed an imaginary object over his shoulder and made a zipping sound. “So, Jake, I know you for long time and I am embarrassed to ask what you are mixed up in, some…some…
bizniss
, with bad peoples.”
    “This would be bad Russian peoples?”
    “Yes! Gangsters. What happens, day before yesterday, in evening, I am going to club, in Brighton Beach, for Odessa peoples, you know? Have Russian bath, play cards, drink a little. So two of them sit by me in steam, they have these tattoos, dragons, tigers, this is showing they are
zeks
, from prison in Siberia, they are proud of this, you understand. These not cultured peoples in the least. So they ask me do I know Jake Mishkin. I say yes, I say Jake Mishkin fine upstanding American citizen, heavy-weight lifter. They say we don’t care about this, we want to know what he does, is he connected, what his business. I say, hey, I see him in gym I am not colleague of his. Then they want to know other things, all kinds I can’t understand what they are saying, some woman, name I never heard of, Raisin Brans or something, so I tell them-”
    “Raisin Brans?”
    “Yes, some name like that, on the box, I can’t remember…”
    “Kellogg.”
    “Yes! Is Kellogg. I say I don’t know no Kellogg, I don’t know any private business from Jake