The Book of Air and Shadows - Michael Gruber [118]
“It must’ve driven him crazy. He didn’t say anything to his niece either.”
“Yes. Poor woman. You don’t have any idea where these spy letters could be?”
“I don’t, but what I want to know now, and maybe you can help me here, is why a Russian gangster is interested in them enough to commit a federal crime. He’s probably not in the Modern Language Association.”
“An organization brimful of gangsters and worse,” said Mickey, smiling. “But I take your point.” He paused, and a peculiar dreamy expression came over his face for just an instant, as if he had just inhaled a mouthful of opium, eyes partly closed, as if contemplating a paradise just out of reach. He came back, however, with an almost audible snap and said,
“Unless…”
I knew just what he meant. “Yeah, unless Bulstrode discovered something on his trip to England that established the existence of the…Item. The Item, let’s say, really exists, and these guys, or someone hiring these guys, knows about it and wants it. But it turns out that the ciphered letters are part of the trail that leads to it. Do we even know if they were with this letter?”
“You’re asking me?”
“Well, yeah. You know more about all this stuff than anyone else but Bulstrode himself and possibly Miranda, both of whom are currently out of reach. Obviously, someone offered Bulstrode a manuscript. What if there were others in the bundle, and he declined to buy them?”
“Impossible! He would’ve sold both his grandmothers for a package like that.”
“Yes, but absent a bull market in grandmothers, how much would he have had to offer, say for just the Bracegirdle original?”
“I don’t know…fifty grand, maybe, if the seller wanted instant cash. At auction, God knows what it would have fetched. Maybe twice that, three times…”
“And did Bulstrode have that kind of cash?”
“Hell, no. He was skinned by the lawyers over that phony Hamlet business. I had to advance him money on his salary when he came over here. Wait a minute…!”
“Yeah, right. If he didn’t have serious money, how did he get hold of the manuscript? Two possibilities. Either he paid a far lower price to an owner who didn’t know what it was, in which case, when the seller was conned into thinking that the Bracegirdle wasn’t worth that much, and if he had the ciphers, he didn’t offer them to Bulstrode at all. Or, Bulstrode sees the whole package and the seller knows the real value and he wants major bucks for it. So why doesn’t Bulstrode go to the Folger? Or to his good pal Dr. Haas for that matter?”
A bitter laugh here. “Because he knew I was broke too?”
“Did he? But let’s say it was because the provenance is shaky. The seller is something of a crook himself, but he knows the value of these letters as a key to something even more gigantic. So Bulstrode goes to Mr. Big and sells him on a deal—help me buy the package and we’ll find the most valuable item on earth and—”
“That’s ridiculous! I mean, sure, Andrew could have lowballed a naive seller, but he couldn’t possibly have known any Mr. Bigs. He hardly knew anyone in New York.”
I thought about this and agreed that Mickey was probably right. Miranda had said much the same thing. I thought for a while and said, “Then there has to be a tertium quid.”
“You mean someone who knew the value of what Bulstrode had and also knew gangsters? And wanted the big payoff. Are there people like that?”
“Yes,” I said. “I’m a person like that. I know a distinguished professor of English literature, you, and I also know some hard boys. It’s probably not as uncommon as we’d like to believe. Stockbroker types never seem to have trouble finding a thug to knock off their wives. Or vice versa. In any case,