“Umm, and you sold this letter to Bulstrode, your mother said.”
“Yeah. And I’m sorry, Fanny, I should have come straight to you.”
“Yes, you should have. Your dear mother thinks you were cheated.”
“I know.”
She patted his arm. “Well, we shall see. Show me the part where you thought he mentioned Shakespeare.”
Crosetti did so, and the little librarian adjusted a goosenecked lamp to cast an intense beam at the bright paper and peered at it through her lens. “Yes, this seems a clear enough secretary hand,” she remarked. “I have certainly had to deal with worse.” She read the passage aloud slowly, like a dim third-grader, and when she reached the end exclaimed, “Dear God!”
“Shit!” cried Crosetti and pounded his fist into his thigh hard enough to sting.
“Indeed,” said Doubrowicz, “you have been well cogged and coney-catched, as our friend here would have said. How much did he pay you?”
“Thirty-five hundred.”
“Oh, dear me. What a shame!”
“I could have got a lot more, right?”
“Oh, yes. If you had come to me and we had established the authenticity of the document beyond any reasonable doubt-and for a document of this nature and importance, that in itself would have been a considerable task-then there’s no telling what it would have fetched at auction. We would probably not be in it, since it’s a little out of our line, but the Folger and the Huntington would have been in full cry. More than that, to someone like Bulstrode, having possession, exclusive possession, of something like this-why, it’s a career in itself. No wonder he cheated you! He must have seen immediately that this thing would place him back in the center of Shakespeare studies. No one would ever mention that unfortunate fake again. It would be like an explosion opening up an entirely fresh field of scholarship. People have been arguing for years about Shakespeare’s religion and his political stance and here we find an official of the English government suspecting him not only of papistry but papistry of a potentially treasonous nature. Then you have a whole set of research lines to explore: this Bracegirdle fellow, his history, who he knew, where he traveled, and the history of the man he worked for, this Lord D. Perhaps there are files in some old muniment room that no one has ever explored. And since we know that Shakespeare was never actually prosecuted, we would want to know why not, was he protected by someone even more powerful than Lord D.? And on and on. Then we have a collection of enciphered letters apparently describing a spy’s observation of William Shakespeare, an actual detailed contemporary record of the man’s activities-an unimaginable treasure in itself, assuming they can be deciphered, and believe me, cryptographers will be fighting with sticks to get hold of them. But at least we have these in original.”
Doubrowicz leaned back in her chair and stared up at the coffered ceiling, fanned herself dramatically with her hand, and laughed her sharp little bark. It was a gesture familiar to Crosetti from his childhood, when the children had brought what they imagined was an utterly insolvable puzzle. “But, my dear Albert, all that, enticing as it is, is mere trivia compared to the real prize.”
Crosetti felt his throat dry up. “You mean that an autograph manuscript might still exist.”
“Yes, and not just that. Let me see, does he give a date anywhere?” She lifted her magnifier and cast over the sheets, like a bird seeking a scurrying bug. “Hm, yes, here is one, 1608, and here, ah yes, he seems to have begun his spying career around 1610. Do you understand the significance of that date, Albert?”
“Macbeth?”
“No, no, Macbeth was 1606. And we know how it came to be written and there were no secret Bracegirdles involved. The year 1610 was the year of The Tempest, and after that, except for some small things, collaborations and the like, Shakespeare wrote no more plays, and that means…”
“Oh, God, it’s a new play!”
“An unknown, unrecorded, unsuspected play by William Shakespeare. In autograph.” She placed her hand on her chest. “My heart. Darling, I think I am a little too old for this kind of excitement. In any case, if genuine, I say again, if genuine, well…you know we say ‘priceless’ very easily nowadays, by which we mean very expensive, but this would be truly in a class by itself.”
“Millions?”
“Pah! Hundreds…hundreds of millions. The manuscript alone, if proved authentic, would be certainly the most valuable single manuscript, perhaps the most valuable portable object, in the world, on a par with the greatest paintings. And then, whoever owned the manuscript would have the copyright too. I am not an expert here but that would be my guess. Theatrical productions-every director and producer on earth would be selling their children for the right to mount the premiere, and don’t even mention films! On the other hand, lest we build too high a castle in the air, the whole thing could be an elaborate fraud.”
“A fraud? I don’t get it-who’s defrauding who?”
“Well, you know Bulstrode was caught once by a clever forger. Perhaps they thought he was ripe for another try.”
“Really? I’d think he’d be the last person to go to. Who’d believe him? The whole point is that his credibility is shot, that’s why he’s so desperate to recoup.”
She laughed. “You should go up to Foxwood sometimes, to the casino. If those who lost heavily did not desperately try to recoup, as you put it, they would have to close their doors. Of course, were I a villain, I would not attempt such a scheme.”
“Why not?”
“Because, darling, how would you create the prize? The play itself? It is one thing to forge a bad quarto of Hamlet. We have Hamlet and we have bad quartos and we have some idea of Shakespeare’s sources for the play. And the text does not have to possess any particular quality. In parts it need not even make sense; bad quartos often do not. You know what a bad quarto is, yes? Good, so you must realize that here it is entirely different. Here you must invent an entire play by the greatest dramatic poet who ever lived, and who was then at the height of his powers. It can’t be done. Someone tried it already once, you know.”
“Who tried it?”
“A silly little fellow named William Henry Ireland, back in the eighteenth century. His father was a scholar, and Willie wanted to impress him, so he started finding documents related to Shakespeare in old trunks. Completely ludicrous, but with the state of analysis and scholarship that then was, many people were taken in. Well, nothing would do but that he had to find a new play by Shakespeare, and he did, an abortion he called Vortigern, and Kemble produced it at the Drury Lane Theatre. It was howled off the stage, naturally. Meanwhile the great scholar Malone had exposed all the other manuscripts as fraudulent and the whole thing collapsed. Now, Ireland was a dullard and easily exposed. Pascoe, the man who tricked Bulstrode, was a good deal smarter, but what we’re talking about is of another order. It could not be a mere pastiche, you see: it would have to be Shakespeare, and he is dead.”
“So you think it’s the real deal.”
“This I cannot say without examining the original. In the meantime, I will type out for you a Word document from this Bracegirdle’s letter so you will not have to learn Jacobean secretary hand and you can read what he has to say. Also, I will prepare another Word document based on these supposed enciphered letters so at least you can see what the ciphertext looks like. If you don’t mind, I would like to keep the letters here and run some elementary tests on them. If they are not genuine seventeenth century, of course, we can all have a good laugh and forget the whole thing. In fact, I will do that first, and if they prove genuine I will send to you the two documents by e-mail, and also I will give you the name of a man I know who is interested in ciphers and such things. If we can generate a solution, it gives us a bit of bargaining against Bulstrode. For he has not got these, and they may hold information about the location of the autograph play, do you see?”
Crosetti did. He said, “Thanks, Fanny. I feel like such a jerk.”
“Yes,
but as I say all is perhaps not lost. I will be happy to meet this Bulstrode and tell him what I think of his sly tricks. Let me begin with the transcription of the cipher first. It should not take too long. Will you stay?”
“No, I have to get back to work. I don’t know a lot about crypto but maybe it’s a simple substitution. They couldn’t have been all that sophisticated back then.”
“Oh, I think you would be surprised. There are ciphers in French of the ancien régime that have never been broken. Still, we could be lucky.”
“Who’s this cipher expert you mentioned?”
“Oh, Klim? He is a Polish person too, but a more recent immigrant. He was a cryptanalyst with the WSW in Warsaw, that is, military counterintelligence. Now he drives a hearse. If you leave me alone now, I will have this done in a little bit. And don’t feel too bad about yourself, Albert. There was a woman involved, after all, and you are still young.”
Feeling as old as Fanny, however, Crosetti slumped out of the library and took the Madison bus uptown to the bookstore. There was a new woman working there, Pamela, this one genuinely ex-Barnard: short, earnestly intellectual, attractive, well-turned out, engaged to someone on Wall Street. It was as if Carolyn Rolly had never been, except that occasionally Glaser would mention that she had vanished without telling him what she had done with the prints from the Churchill Voyages. When Crosetti entered the shop today, however, Glaser hailed him and ushered him into the little office he kept in the rear of the shop.
“You’ll be interested to know that Rolly has surfaced,” Glaser announced. “Take a look at this.”
He handed Crosetti a brown envelope with the slick crinkly feel that announced it as foreign. It had a British stamp and a London postmark. Inside Crosetti found a letter written in Rolly’s beautiful italic hand, black ink on heavy cream paper. He felt his face grow hot and a pang darted down his center, and he had to restrain himself from raising the paper to his nostrils and sniffing it. He read:
Dear Sidney,
Please forgive me for leaving you in the lurch like this, and for not contacting you to let you know what I was doing. Since I didn’t know when the shop would reopen, I thought it would not be too much of a burden on you and would give you sufficient time to find a replacement. But I was rude not to call you earlier and I am sorry. What happened was that I was called away to London on urgent family business, which then turned into a career opportunity, so it looks like I will be staying here in the UK indefinitely.
The good news, from your perspective, is that I was able to sell the maps and plates from the broken Churchill for what I believe was a far higher price than we would have received on the American market-3,200 British pounds! They seem to have an insatiable appetite here for good-quality prints from their glory days. I enclose an international money order for $5,712.85. I paid the various fees out of my pocket, to make up for any inconvenience you might have suffered.
Do say good-bye to Mrs. Glaser for me and to Albert. You’ve all been far kinder to me than I deserved.
Best,
Carolyn Rolly
Crosetti handed the letter back with lead in his belly. He had to clear his throat heavily before saying, “Well. Good for her. I didn’t know she had family in England.”
“Oh, yes,” Glaser replied. “She once mentioned that the name was originally Raleigh, as in Sir Walter, and she implied that there was some connection to the famous one. Maybe she inherited the family castle. That’s quite a sale, anyway. I always figured our Carolyn was heading for higher things than bookstore clerking. Did you print out those auction notices I wanted?”
“This morning. They should be in your in-box.”
Glaser nodded, grunted an acknowledgment, and walked off, and Crosetti clumped down the stairs to his cave. It was a more pleasant work environment than it had been before the fire, for the insurance had paid for a complete renovation, including neat steel shelves and a new Dell computer with all the latest stuff attached. The cellar now smelled of paint and tile adhesive instead of dust and cooking grease, but the improvement did not noticeably help Crosetti’s mood. Each time “How could she?” appeared in his mental theater, the answer came swiftly: “Schmuck! You had one date. What did you expect, love forever? She got a better deal and split.” On the other hand, there was Crosetti’s devout belief that the body never lied, and he could not accept that Rolly had lied to him in that way, that one night. She was a liar, sure, but he could not accept that sort of falsehood. Why should she? To repay him for a nice evening? It made no sense.
And speaking of lies, went the inner voice, that letter was complete horseshit. We know she didn’t break those volumes, therefore didn’t sell the prints. He was as sure of that as he was about the honesty of the flesh. So where did she get the nearly six grand she paid out to Glaser? Answer: someone supplied it, plus the costs of travel to England, and for this the only suspect was Professor Bulstrode, for there was no one else on the scene who both had that sort of money and was in England. She had gone to England with Bulstrode. But why? Kidnapped? No, that was absurd: professors of English did not kidnap people except in the sort of preposterous movies that Crosetti despised. Then why did she go?
Two possibilities presented themselves, one unpleasant, one frightening. The unpleasant possibility was that Carolyn saw the opportunity for a big score, the possibility of actually finding the supposed Shakespeare treasure. She’d read Bracegirdle’s letter and called Bulstrode behind Crosetti’s back (that long wait outside her loft!), set up the sale of the Bracegirdle manuscript, pressured Crosetti to sell, and then-he wanted to think-fallen a little in love but not quite enough to make her willing to miss the opportunity to get out of a life of crushing poverty.
The frightening possibility was that she was acting under duress, that Bulstrode had something on her, a threat far worse than just losing her clerk’s job and having to deal with the cops. No, that was another lie-the cops were not after any Carolyn Rolly, not according to his sister anyway. But maybe it was a little of both, a carrot and a stick. He had to have new information. Information was what allowed you to separate the lies from the truth.
As soon as this thought appeared, Crosetti swiveled in his chair and faced his new computer. He actually did have some new information, and because of the moping he’d been doing lately he hadn’t thought to use it. From the back pocket of his jeans he extracted the two items he had scooped from the street outside Carolyn’s former home. The photograph was a one-hour-photo print of two women and two children, a boy of four or so and a baby girl. One of the women was a younger Carolyn Rolly, with her hair jammed up under a feed cap, and the other woman was a pretty blonde. They were sitting on a bench in some kind of park or playground, in summer sunshine, the trees around them, heavy with leaf, throwing dark shadows on the ground. They were looking at the photographer and smiling, with the sun in their faces making them squint slightly. It was not a good photograph; Crosetti knew that the cheap instant camera it was taken with could not deal with the contrast between bright sun and shade, and so the faces were washed out, especially those of the kids. But Carolyn had kept it and then walked away from it, as if abandoning her life once again. He studied the silvery faces, looking for signs of family connections, but again there was too little information.
He scanned the photograph into the computer, called up PhotoShop, and played with the contrast for a while, and then downloaded a program he’d used before that enhanced just such photos, using statistical methods. The result was a better look at the family, because now it was clear that it was a family. This had to be Carolyn’s sister, or at least a first cousin, and the two kids were clearly related to either or both of the women. Crosetti could not have said exactly why he knew this, but he was from a large family, and from a social and ethnic stratum where large families were common, and the fact was instinctively clear to him.
The picture on the postcard bore the legend CAMP WYANDOTTE done in what was supposed to look like birch stic
ks, and depicted a fir-lined mountain lake, a dock, and some boys canoeing. The message side had a three-year-old postmark and said, in childish block printing: Dear Mommy Im haveing a good time at camp. We catched a snake. I love you Emmett. It was addressed, in an adult hand, to Mrs. H. Olerud, 161 Tower Rd., Braddock PA 16571.
Turning to the computer, Crosetti generated a map of the address, which turned out to be in western Pennsylvania, near Erie. He used Google-Earth on the address and brought up the roof of a modest frame house with outbuildings, surrounded by scrubby woodlands. Zooming out from that image showed a semirural neighborhood like those that surround the smaller, tired towns of the American Rust Belt: five-acre plots, broken cars and appliances in the yards, woodpiles: scruffy zones inhabited by people who used to have good manufacturing or mining employment and now barely got by on sporadic work or McJobs. Did this milieu spawn the exotic creature that was Rolly? He looked again at the photograph of the two women and the kids at the playground and wished that he were thirty years in the future when Google (he was sure) would let you google the interiors of all the houses and study the faces of all the inhabitants of the planet. At present, however, a journey would be required.
BRACEGIRDLE LETTER (8)
We crost the seas with fayre windes until 23rd July when the skye came all over black as night & commense a greate wind. The fleete wase scattered entirelie & oure ship drave upon a rock & wracked but through the mercie of God none perished save three men & Mr Tolliver one of them, may God have mercie on his sowle & now is all his quizzing done for he seeth face to face. When the storm abates wee had greate feare for wee find we are upon the Bermoothes, which all mariners dight Isle of Devils, for dwelleth salvages there that eate mens fleashe or soe twas thought. But we landed having no other choyce & found not salvages but a place near to Paradise, waters, meadowes, fruite trees &c. with pleasaunt flowered aires most swete. Was good cedern timber abounding too & wee set to building two boates fit to carry all o’ wee & passed there near one yeare before sayling & I gayne greate credit for steeryng by starres and Sun & did arrive with the Lords holpe at Jamestown 23rd Maye the Yeare Ten. All this tale has been tolde before in bookes wrote by Mr Wm Strachey of oure partie which you have read, soe I will saye no more of this.
The Book of Air and Shadows Page 18
