“Lunch?” I said when he was connected.
“This is a lunch call? You sounded like your pants were on fire.”
“It’s a desperate lunch call. I’m being chased by Russian gangsters. I really need to talk to someone.”
“Okay. I had something with my publisher, but I can cancel. You’ll send Omar?”
“I’ll come up. We’ll go someplace new.” Of course they would be watching my usual haunts…
We went to Sichuan Gardens on Ninety-sixth, somewhat to Mickey’s amusement. The place is dim and on the second floor of a commercial block, and I sat with my back to the mirrored wall where I could watch the entryway. To fine my alertness to an even higher degree I had a martini.
“So, Lefty,” he said when we had ordered, “you think Big Max got a contract out on you?”
“This is not funny, man,” I said. “This is not supposed to be my life.”
“No, your life is supposed to be long dull days at the office doing work you don’t particularly like, whose purpose is to render the creative act even more of a commodity than it already is. And chasing pussy in your off hours, looking for the romantic fix that will stay fixed, even though you already found it years ago, and if you did once again convince yourself you found Miss Perfecto, you’d go off chasing pussy again as soon after the wedding as you possibly could, a dreary cycle that will end only when you locate someone sturdy, reliable, and mercenary who will stick around to nurse you through your final illness and collect all the chips.”
“Thank you for your support, Mickey,” I said as icily as I could. “And fuck you very much.”
“Whereas now,” he continued, undismayed, “you’re living the life of a man, every moment rich with import, with danger and excitement. A Shakespearian life, you could say, a life worthy of Richard Bracegirdle. Would you want Hamlet to go back to college and join a frat? Get drunk and party and get a B minus in Scholasticism 101?”
“Doesn’t he get killed at the end of the play?”
“He does, but don’t we all? The choice is only how we live in the previous five acts. Have you come any closer to finding the Bracegirdle original, speaking of spine-tingling excitement?”
“No, and I don’t intend to,” I snarled, since I was being frank with Mickey and did not require any sympathy from him, did not care if he thought I might be in danger, which is why I had mendaciously suggested this possibility to my wife. “I want to have nothing to do with Bracegirdle apart from insuring that Russian gangsters or whoever is after the ciphers leaves me the fuck alone. What about you? Have you penetrated the mysterious manuscript any since I saw you last?”
“No, and I don’t intend to,” he echoed. “Giving something like that to a scholar is like giving a glossy photo of a roast beef dinner to a starving man. It’ll make his mouth water but is devoid of nourishment. Without the original, as I think I’ve said, the text itself is a nullity. Never mind a putative letter from a guy who spied on the man, I could whip up a convincing facsimile of Shakespeare’s personal diary in a spare afternoon, answering questions that have plagued scholars for years. What Russian gangsters?”
Now the whole thing emerged in a rush-Miranda, Amalie, Russians, the law firm, and all. Mickey chopsticked up his spicy beef with buckwheat noodles and listened quietly, as for years I have depended on him to do, as he has on me. When I ran out of words, I asked him for his opinion and suggested that he not just tell me I was fucked up, because I already knew that.
He said, “You’re going to see this Crosetti kid with the ciphers?”
“Yeah, but they think I’m going there to dicker about returning the original that Bulstrode screwed him out of. I have absolutely no leverage on him, except money.”
“That’s always seemed to be a decent enough lever to me. Meanwhile, what do you intend to do with your life? Do you think it’s likely you’ll really be disbarred?”
“Maybe, if there’s a complaint from the heir. I’d have to make restitution, obviously…”
“You ought to go see him.”
“The heir? I can’t do that!”
“Why not? Have a chat, tell him what happened, beat your breast and cry mercy. You know the trouble with you lawyers is that sometimes, in your efforts to be absolutely legal, you forget ordinary human intercourse. What can he do to you? Call you an asshole? You already know that. And maybe you’ll find out something about you-know-what. Maybe Andrew confided in his longtime companion. Anyway, you’ll have a nice talk. You were probably one of the last people to see his boyfriend alive-he’ll probably be grateful for the meeting. And you can return the personal effects. It’d be a nice gesture after your various peccadilloes.”
Yes, it was definitely Mickey who first put it into my head to go to England and talk with Oliver March. Whether I would have gone or not was still in doubt when I left Mickey at the campus, but later events changed that. I felt somewhat better after my lunch. For some reason, virtually every Chinese restaurant in New York has a full bar, even joints that look like they don’t sell a martini a month. I had three, something I had never done at lunchtime before in my life.
The remainder of the afternoon is somewhat blurry. Perhaps there was a discussion of marriage with Omar, me quizzing him on Muslim practices in this area. Was fidelity easier if you had two or three? I can’t recall his answer exactly. We went back to my loft and I had another drink, a scotch, and then a nap. From which I was awakened by the merry dinging of my cell phone, upon which I was sleeping. I punched the green button and it said “You jerk!” in my ear, by which I knew it was my brother.
Clearly, he’d been talking to Amalie and Miri while I was eating and sleeping and had the whole story from both those angles and he let me know what he thought of my recent behavior. “Was that it?” I said after the blast had dissipated. “Because I have an appointment at a child brothel in twenty minutes.”
This he ignored as it deserved, and said
What does it matter what he said, exactly? I was blurred with drink and unpleasant sottish dreams and so I can’t really recall. I think we talked about Amalie and about her asking him to pull his thugs off the case and her plans to leave the country. I was probably rude to him as I so often am, for I have never quite forgiven him for turning out a better man than me, and also I was sick of being lectured by my family about my many defects. I may have asked him about our father, about whether he was connected in some way with Shvanov and his doings. He told me he didn’t know, but it was possible, if any scams were going down. What kind of scams?
He said, this Shakespeare business, dummy. It has all the earmarks of a big con: the secret document, never authenticated and now lost, the priceless treasure, the dupe Bulstrode, the false heiress. It stank of fraud, and since it was a bunch of extremely dangerous gangsters who had been defrauded, it would be a wise move not to get involved any more and to get the word out that I was no longer a player. Something like that. Did I beg him to intercede with Amalie not to leave the country? I may have. As I said, it’s vague.
Hideously clear, in contrast, is what happened during the remainder of my evening. My stomach was acting up, as it always does when I drink to excess during the day, so I made myself some poached eggs, toast, and tea, and around six or so had Omar drive me out to godforsaken Queens, to Ozone Park. It was dark when we arrived at a street of depressing little bungalows, all with vest pocket front yards protected by chain-link fencing and decorated with Madonnas and mirror balls on pedestals. It reminded me forcefully of my Brooklyn roots and my unhappy childhood. I was prepared not to like the inhabitants.