What Time Devours

by A. J. Hartley

  He turned abruptly away and checked his watch. He had time for one of his slow, pounding runs around Evanston’s twilit streets before going on to meet Escolme. Anything to get that face out of his mind.

  His phone rang once and he snatched it up.

  “Hello?”

  “Mr. Knight, this is Lieutenant Polinski. We spoke this morning. You have a second?”

  “Sure.”

  “We’re still trying to get an ID on the victim, but I need to ask you again if you’re sure you didn’t know her.”

  “I’m sure. I wouldn’t forget.” Those eyes. “Why?” he asked.

  “You keep your garbage by the kitchen door?”

  “Yes.”

  “And it gets collected when?”

  “Wednesday morning, from the front.”

  “The crime scene guys turned up a piece of paper—actually, a yellow Post-it note—in a bush a few yards from the body. It could just be garbage, but it seems unlikely that it’s been lying out there for almost a week, particularly since we had that rain over the weekend.”

  “What did it say?”

  “It just had your name and address written on it in pencil. Have you thrown anything like that out recently?”

  “No. I already know where I live.”

  “Right,” said Polinski. “That’s what I figured. When we know who she is we’ll be trying to match the handwriting, but for now we’re working on the assumption that the note was hers.”

  “Which means . . . ?”

  “That she was coming to see you. You sure you didn’t know her?”

  Thomas stared blankly at the wall and she had to prompt him before he said, again, “I’m sure.”

  It was only after he hung up that he began to wonder if that was true.

  CHAPTER 6

  It was hardly surprising that Escolme was staying at the Drake. Thomas took the Red Line to Chicago and State and walked down to where the Magnificent Mile began. The hotel itself—muted Deco elegance outside and red-carpeted opulence inside—always reminded Thomas of some fine old English theater, some place built by Henry Irving where you might find a young John Gielgud having a quick smoke by the stage door. It wasn’t squeaky clean like most of the glass-and-chrome high-rises, and its prestige lay in a certain gilded shabbiness that spoke, in so far as Chicago could, of venerable age. Thomas liked it, but he felt like an impostor.

  He walked quickly under the paneled ceilings and overwrought chandeliers, dodging vast floral arrangements set up like defensive gun casements, till he found the reception desk where he brandished Escolme’s room number as if he were claiming sanctuary. The uniformed black man pointed the way to brass-doored elevators flanked by potted palms.

  Thomas was wearing faded jeans and a flannel shirt with a leather jacket, and when he caught a woman in a Chanel suit looking at him skeptically, he gave her a defiant look that set her fiddling with her purse.

  The defiance was bravado. Places like this always left him tucking his shirt in and standing up straight as if he were trying—vainly, of course—to blend in, or worse, to impress someone. He felt a flush of irritation that Escolme had insisted they meet here, as if the agent were rubbing his former mentor’s nose in his success.

  But that didn’t feel right either. Escolme had been a good kid. Quirky, perhaps, a bit neurotic, but neither arrogant nor mean spirited.

  The elevator door opened and Thomas stepped out, checked the room numbers, and moved down a hallway till he reached 304. The door was a rich heavy timber that might have been teak—more the door of a family home than a hotel room—and was fitted with a similarly heavy brass knocker.

  He knocked and waited.

  When nothing happened, he knocked again.

  Suddenly the door flew open and Thomas saw David Escolme for the first time in a decade.

  It was a momentary meeting. Having flung the door open, Escolme peered at Thomas for a moment, then turned his back on him, muttering, and went quickly back into the room, leaving the door open. Thomas stepped uneasily inside and, for a moment, watched his host as he riffled vaguely through books on his desk, then hurled them to the floor with a shout of rage. Whatever he had heard in David Escolme’s voice over the phone had intensified exponentially.

  The agent seemed to have forgotten him. He was pacing, his lips moving constantly, stopping periodically to rub his temples with both hands, a picture of frustration and despair. He was wearing what were probably his work clothes, including wingtips, but had discarded his jacket and tie and unfastened several buttons of his rumpled shirt. The room Thomas was standing in was a mirror of its owner: what had been elegant and sophisticated overturned as if by a whirl-wind. The floor was strewn with books and papers, a coffee table had been upended, and the vase of tulips that had been sitting on it lay in pieces on the carpet. A familiar CD case lay on the floor: XTC’s English Settlement.

  “David?” said Thomas. “Is everything okay?”

  Escolme turned, as if just remembering he wasn’t alone, produced a hollow bark of laughter, and went back to his pacing, picking his way between overturned drawers of clothes and what looked to be champagne bottles, at least half a dozen of them, strewn across the floor like howitzer shells.

  “I’m sorry,” said Thomas. “This looks like a bad time. I’ll let myself out and maybe, if you’d like to give me a call sometime . . .”

  “No!” Escolme shouted. “Don’t go.”

  The vagueness in his eyes was suddenly gone, and he looked earnest and desperate.

  “You are obviously busy,” Thomas continued. “I can come back . . .”

  “No,” said Escolme again, crossing quickly to him and grasping Thomas’s arm in a knuckle-whitening grasp. “Please. I am . . . not quite myself. But I need you here. Please, sit down.”

  The inadequacy of the phrase “not quite myself” and the fact that there wasn’t an upright chair in the room that wasn’t covered with discarded books and papers made Thomas hesitate. Escolme turned a leather-backed wing chair, swept a stack of legal briefs onto the floor, and motioned to it.

  “Please,” he said again.

  Slowly, his eyes on the agent, Thomas sat down.

  “Perhaps you would like to join me,” said Thomas, cautiously.

  Escolme nodded thoughtfully and repeatedly, as if mulling the suggestion, then took a seat opposite him, crunching the broken vase underfoot as he did so.

  “What’s going on, David?”

  For a long moment the young man was quite still, and then, to Thomas’s horror, he put his hands in his face again, rocked forward, and emitted a long, breathless sob. At last he lowered his hands, but his face was still set in a grimace of grief, mouth stretched wide in the parody of a smile, eyes squeezed shut, tears smeared on his cheeks.

  “I lost it,” he breathed.

  “What?” said Thomas, still tense and uncomfortable, his voice barely more than a whisper.

  Escolme looked at him then, as if steeling himself to say the words.

  “Love’s Labour’s Won.”

  “What?”

  “Love’s Labour’s Won,” he repeated. “The Shakespeare play.”

  Thomas stared at him, incredulous.

  “But that never existed,” said Thomas. “Or if it did, we don’t have it. It’s lost.”

  “Not lost,” said Escolme. “I held it in my hands only hours ago. And now it’s gone.”

  CHAPTER 7

  “What are you talking about?” said Thomas. All the tension had suddenly evaporated and he felt curiously relaxed, as if the whole thing had been a joke or a misunderstanding. “Love’s Labour’s Won? There’s no such thing.”

  “There is,” said Escolme. “There was. I had it.”

  “David, it doesn’t exist,” said Thomas, kindly. “It never existed.”

  “It did,” said the agent, calming now, so that the frantic despair was turning into exhaustion. “It does. I had it,” he said, his eyes closing again. “Here.”

&n
bsp; The energy drained out of him again and he slumped in his chair.

  “How could you have had it?” Thomas said, trying to keep the disbelief out of his voice, trying to protect the man from what was surely a delusion.

  “I had it.” He sighed. “I had it, and it’s gone.”

  This was becoming a mantra. Thomas tried a different tack.

  “Where did you find it?”

  “Oh, I didn’t find it. I was loaned it,” said Escolme. “By a client.”

  Thomas breathed out slowly so that the air whistled. It was one thing to have lost something Escolme thought was a lost play by Shakespeare; it was another thing entirely to have lost something a client had entrusted to him, something the client believed to be a lost play by Shakespeare. It wasn’t of course; it couldn’t be. But if someone thought it was—or merely claimed it was—and then put it into their agent’s safekeeping . . . No wonder Escolme was freaking out. This could destroy him.

  “Okay,” said Thomas. “So when did you last have it?”

  He might have been helping Kumi find her car keys.

  “I put it in the hotel safe when I arrived,” he said. “I got it out an hour ago to show you.”

  The agent’s eyes flashed at Thomas as if this were somehow his fault. Thomas ignored the idea.

  “And you kept it in here?” he said.

  “Yes,” said Escolme. “It was here. Right here,” he said, slapping the bed with his hand. “It was in this black attaché case. I took a shower. Changed my clothes. I didn’t notice it had gone till . . .” He glanced at his watch like a man who had no idea whether it was day or night. “. . . twenty minutes ago. But it must have gone while I was in the bathroom.”

  Thomas scowled at the evidence of the search around him. This was Escolme’s own desperate work, not the act of an intruder, and it had been done not as the rational search of someone who had mislaid something, but in the desperate chaos of hoping against hope. The briefcase was open on the bed, slewed into the stripped sheets. If the agent was right, someone had timed their entrance perfectly and had known what they were looking for and where to find it. Everything else in the room, champagne bottles included, had been unsettled by his own subsequent panic.

  “Is anything else missing?” Thomas asked.

  Escolme stared at him.

  “You mean, did I have any other priceless artifacts lying around?” asked Escolme with sudden scorn. “A forgotten Van Gogh still life, maybe, or a long-lost Michelangelo marble . . . ?”

  “That’s a no, then,” Thomas cut in.

  “That’s a no,” said Escolme, deflating again.

  “Then we should call the police,” said Thomas.

  “No,” said Escolme. “Absolutely not. You might as well call the Tribune. I’d be finished.”

  “The owner, then.”

  “Again, no,” said Escolme with the careful emphasis of someone warning a persistently irritable child. “And for the same reason.”

  “Who knew you had it?” he said.

  “No one,” said Escolme. “Just my client.”

  “Who is—?”

  “I can’t tell you that,” he said.

  Thomas snorted.

  “Maybe I should go,” he said.

  “No,” said Escolme. “Don’t. I just can’t tell you that.”

  Thomas checked his watch.

  “Other people at the agency must have known?” he said.

  “No. VFL gives us a lot of leeway. No one stands over us because we’re so good at what we do.” He grinned wolfishly, his eyes empty. “I answer to no one.”

  “I’m sorry, David,” said Thomas. “I don’t think I can help you. I don’t understand why you called me.”

  He picked up one of the fallen champagne bottles for something to do and set it on the bedside table. It was full, the foil still tight over the wired cork. Thomas studied the label to break Escolme’s hold on his eyes. It was French, labeled Saint Evremond Reims. He’d never heard of it. He risked a look at Escolme.

  The agent’s fiery defiance had crumbled so that the schoolboy he had been shimmered into view like the picture on a faulty TV. He looked lost and wounded and alone.

  “Sounds like a Sherlock Holmes story, doesn’t it?” he said, quietly. “Locked rooms and missing papers. “ ‘The Naval Treaty.’ Remember that one?”

  “Vaguely,” said Thomas. Something about the reference bothered him, and that showed in his face.

  “You have to help,” Escolme said, suddenly pleading.

  “I don’t know how,” said Thomas.

  And that was the truth, though the full truth was that he wasn’t sure he wanted to help. He didn’t like the feel of the situation and was relieved to be able to extricate himself—honestly—on the grounds of his undeniable ignorance.

  “I really don’t know what to do,” he said. “I’d talk to your client or the police, but I understand why you don’t want to.”

  “I see.”

  “I’m sorry,” Thomas said. “I’m going to go now. If there’s anything I can do to help, call me.”

  Escolme looked numb. He nodded, his eyes glazed, but said nothing.

  “You okay?” said Thomas. “I mean, if you need me to stay . . .”

  “Daniella Blackstone,” he said.

  Thomas thought for a moment. The name resonated but unspecifically.

  “That’s your client?” he said.

  “As in Blackstone and Church,” said Escolme, “yes.”

  Thomas whistled in spite of himself.

  “Don’t be too impressed,” said Escolme. “I can’t get anything of hers published. She’s not that great a writer.”

  “Then she’s incredibly lucky,” said Thomas. “I can’t remember a week when Blackstone and Church weren’t on the New York Times bestseller list.”

  Blackstone and Church wrote mysteries set in England starring a detective inspector who also happened to be a peer of the realm, and who handled cases with a supernatural bent. Thomas had read two and had found them both preposterous and hugely entertaining.

  “But that’s Blackstone and Church, isn’t it?” Escolme shot back. “Not just Blackstone. The woman couldn’t write a decent story if her life depended on it. She’s been a stone around Elsbeth Church’s neck for over a decade. They wrote their last co-authored book two years ago, and a year after that announced that they would be writing solo stuff for the foreseeable future. Blackstone hasn’t been able to get published since, and given the crap publishers spew out, that should tell you something.”

  “So why do you represent her?” said Thomas.

  “Because all my other authors are waiting for the Nobel committee to call, you mean?” said the agent, caustic again. “Because she separated from her representation when she split with Church, and because her publisher had done such a great job of hiding how little of Blackstone and Church was actually Blackstone, that we snapped her up. Of course, it took about ten minutes—or more accurately, ten pages—to see that she was dead weight, and about another ten minutes for her former publisher to leak that out to further Elsbeth Church’s solo work. So for eight months I’ve been pushing her crap, trying to get a press to pay a ghostwriter to get in on the act, and had no bites. Then she shows up in New York with a play, of all things, handwritten.”

  Thomas stared at him. None of this felt right.

  “Handwritten?”

  “Oh, not in Shakespeare’s hand,” said the agent. “Her own. First, she says she wrote it as a response to Shakespeare and could she get it copyrighted? I knew she was lying after reading the first ten lines. The woman could no more have written that than flown to the moon. I called her on it and she took it away in a sulk. A week later she calls me up. No she didn’t write it, she says. She copied it. The original is Shakespeare’s and no one knows it exists. Can I figure out how to secure some form of rights for her that will ensure she never has to write another lousy word? I tell her that if it’s Shakespeare it will be public domain and s
he’ll have no rights to the content beyond the value of the manuscript itself. ‘Then we’ll have to restrict who sees it,’ she says. ‘I can’t copyright the work, but I can copyright the edition, and make sure everything comes from that.’ I tell her the first step is to very quietly verify that it is what she says it is. She tells me to go ahead, carefully, and brings me these handwritten pages. She dares not even photocopy it in case someone sees it. She sure as hell won’t give me the original, so I have only her transcript. Any investigation of the text thus hinges on the words themselves, not the composition of the ink, the age of the paper, and so on.”

  “I don’t think I understand,” said Thomas. “I mean, if it’s just her copy, then the thing you’ve lost has no value, right? And she still has the original. So what’s the problem?”

  “Because no one can know about it!” he said. “If there’s another copy floating around out there, there’s no way she can keep the content secret. Next thing you know the whole thing is on the Web, it’s public domain, and no one makes a cent.”

  “There can’t be that much money riding on this,” Thomas began. “Surely . . .”

  “Are you joking?” Escolme snapped, his voice rising, the muscles of his face tense and still. “A quarto of Hamlet was auctioned for twenty million U.S. a year ago, and that’s a play we already know inside out, and one that exists in multiple copies of multiple early printings. Can you put a price on the only extant version of a lost Shakespeare play? I can’t. But it’s not about the value of the artifact itself. Even if the copyright were considered public domain, the owner of that one copy could pluck numbers out of the air while the film, theater, and book producers lined up to get a look at it.”

  “I know . . . ,” Thomas began.

  “No,” said Escolme with an earnestness tinged with menace. “You don’t. This would be the art discovery of the century. It would make headlines in every newspaper in the world. In the world,” he repeated. “Because Shakespeare is global, the bedrock of culture and education all over the planet. It doesn’t matter if the play is obscure or even bad. It doesn’t matter if it’s the original Shakespearean manuscript or a copy made by some kid in crayon. It’s a new Shakespeare play, and if people agree that that’s what it is, that’s all it has to be. Within a year, you’d be looking at a blockbuster movie starring everyone you’ve ever heard of, and book sales that would make Dan Brown and J. K. Rowling weep. Billions of dollars, Mr. Knight. Billions. That little stack of paper wasn’t a book, it was a potential industry.”