But he kept his mien agreeable when she returned, and they had a stiff little heartbreaking meal together, after which she went back to her seat. He watched The Maltese Falcon, memorizing yet more of the script, and as he watched he very much wished that she would ask him what he was watching, and he could invite her to watch it with him, and he would see if the character of Brigid O’Shaughnessy caught her conscience. But he feared another rejection more than he wanted to find out; in fact, he decided that he didn’t want to find out at all.
At JFK they passed together through customs and immigration and when they left the terminal proper there was a dark-skinned man with a sign that read croseti standing in the exit lobby; and as soon as she saw it, Carolyn touched his arm and said, “Oh, gosh, I forgot something back in the customs shed.”
“What did you forget, Carolyn? You just have that little bag.”
“No, something I bought. I’ll be right back.”
She whipped back through the doors and was gone. Crosetti went up to the man with the sign and introduced himself and the man said that he was Omar and worked for Mr. Mishkin, and had been instructed to drive Mr. Crosetti and Ms. Rolly to Mr. Mishkin’s residence. They waited there, with people rushing and brushing by them for half an hour and then Crosetti went back into the terminal and looked around, quite hopelessly, and returned and drove with the man Omar into Manhattan, slowly through the clotted traffic of the morning rush. Crosetti was not thinking at all clearly, the combination of jet lag and exhaustion both physical and emotional having reduced his brain to a barely sentient sludge, and so it was a good forty-five minutes (the limo then a quarter mile from the Midtown Tunnel) before he remembered to call his mother.
“Albert, you found it!”
“Mom, how did you…?”
“Your friend was just here and told us the whole story.”
“Just here?”
“Yes. She came in a cab, hugged her kids for about ten minutes, and left in the same cab.”
“What? She didn’t take the kids?”
“No, she said she had some business to do first and promised that she’d send for them in a couple of days. Really, Albert, I mean they’re perfectly nice kids but I hope you don’t make a habit of-”
“Did you get the cab number?” Crosetti asked.
“I certainly did not. Why, were you thinking of asking Patsy to run a trace on the ride?”
“No,” Crosetti lied weakly.
“Yes, you were, and you should be ashamed of yourself. That’s dangerously near stalking, darling, and I mean she’s a charming enough woman but it’s also clear that she wants to pursue her own life and that it doesn’t include you.”
Perfectly true, but not something a man needs to hear from his mother. Crosetti broke off the conversation with unnecessary gruffness and tried not to think of Carolyn Rolly for the remainder of the trip to Mishkin’s place and failed.
Crosetti had one friend who had made it big directing commercials, and this friend had a classy SoHo loft, although nothing like the loft that Jake Mishkin had. He commented on this and observed, “I guess I should’ve gone to law school.”
“Perhaps,” said his host, “but I don’t think you have the proper parasitic mouth parts. I believe you’re unfortunately a creator and doomed to support a great pyramid of people like me. Speaking of creators, where is it?”
Crosetti took off his jacket and pulled out the envelope. Mishkin went to a long refectory table and carefully laid out each page, making two rows of eleven.
They both stared at the pages for a while in silence, which Mishkin broke with, “That’s really remarkable. It looks like it was written last week.”
“They were sealed in this,” said Crosetti and took the cylinder from his bag. “It was air and water tight, so hardly any decay or oxidation. Bracegirdle did a good job.”
“Yes. Who knows that you found the play?”
“Well, there are three people over in England who know we found something, but not necessarily what, then there’s me and Carolyn and my mom and I guess Klim.”
“And where is Carolyn?”
“I don’t know. She bolted at the airport, dropped by my mother’s house to see her kids, and left.”
“Good Lord! Why would she do a thing like that?”
Crosetti drew a deep breath. Now that he had to actually say it he felt his throat constrict around the words. “I think she’s going to Shvanov, to let him know what we found.”
“Shvanov? What the hell does she have to do with Shvanov?”
Crosetti gave him a short version of what Carolyn had told him in the Oxford hotel room the night she had come tapping upon his window. Mishkin seemed stunned by this revelation. “You mean she’s been Shvanov’s agent all this time?”
“In a way, although I think Carolyn is pretty much always working for Carolyn. But my sense is they have a relationship too.”
“As do you, I presume.”
“Yeah. I thought we were pretty close, but who knows? Have you heard anything about your kids?”
“No. I have a number to call when I have what they want.”
“Which you now have. Are you going to call them? Obviously, Shvanov is going to find out pretty soon if he hasn’t already.”
“Yes, but I’m not sure it’s Shvanov who has the children.”
“Who else could it be?”
“As I said, I’m not sure, but I’ve thought for some time that there are other players involved.” Mishkin picked up the title page and stared at it, as if the ability to read the strange handwriting might thereby flow into his head.
Crosetti said, “You don’t seem very concerned.”
“Oh, I’m concerned. I’m just not frantic.” He turned and faced Crosetti. “You probably don’t think I’m a very good father. I would agree: I’m not. I wasn’t trained by my own father, which I understand is required. How about you, Crosetti? Did you have a good father?”
“Yeah, I did. I thought he was the greatest man on the planet.”
“Lucky you. Deceased, I understand.”
“Yeah. He was driving down the street, coming home from the office, when he spotted a couple of cops chasing a mutt. He got out of the car and joined in and he popped an artery. DOA. I was twelve.”
“Yes. Well, this seems to conclude our business. We didn’t discuss payment for your time. What would you consider fair?”
Crosetti suddenly wanted to get far away from this man and far from the tangled plot he represented. He couldn’t help thinking that Carolyn had a point about the exciting life. The right movie line would have been “You don’t owe me anything,” followed by a slamming exit, but what Crosetti said in real life was, “How about a round ten grand now, and another forty if it proves out?”
Mishkin nodded. “I’ll send you a check.”
21
It’s snowing now, a heavy wet snow such as they get in the Northeast when the temperature is just cold enough for snow to form. I am back at the keyboard after a bracing trip in the chill. I visited the boathouse again and checked out the old mahogany speedboat. It is a seventeen-foot 1947 Chris-Craft Deluxe Runabout, with a ninety-five horsepower six, and it looks in mint condition. I filled its tank from a fifty-five-gallon gasoline drum with a hand pump on it. The key was in the ignition and I started it up. After a little coughing it roared nicely and filled the boathouse with a pungent cloud of blue smoke. The other thing I did was to stow my pistol under the cushion of the driver’s seat. Do I have a plan? Not really. I am preparing for various contingencies. If you are expecting a visit from a number of armed men and you have a weapon yourself, you can either start shooting as soon as they arrive, since if you don’t they will come in and take it away from you, or you can hide the thing and hope you can get to it at need. I was not prepared for a firefight with an unknown number of bad guys and so that is what I did. I wonder whether the snow will interfere with my visitors.