The Book of Air and Shadows - Michael Gruber [133]
So I sat down with the megacorp people and they said that while they agreed my client had been screwed to the floorboards, they had just dropped a bundle on what was basically an industrial commodity and the fact that it had arisen from my client’s guts and heart was neither here nor there. The musician took it, I have to say, pretty well. He just grinned and expressed amazement that he’d thought up stuff out of his head that had transformed itself into this huge piece of property, upon which a vast commercial empire now rested, and that he’d have to content himself with all the pleasure he’d given to so many people. As I said, big hairy kids.
In contrast to Shakespeare, who always had a good eye for the bottom line. Sure he sold Hamlet for ten pounds, maybe forty large in today’s money, but he sold it to himself, since he was a stockholder in the theatrical company that owned it, and he probably made a good deal more after old Dick Bracegirdle became his bookkeeper.
I’m digressing again because this next part is really painful.
After I had the bad-news meeting with the hairy former kid I went across town with Ed Geller and Shelly Grossbart to a monster cluster-fuck involving squadrons of lawyers, something that happens a lot nowadays when one media company proposes to buy another and I was there because I know a lot about foreign copyright law and it’s all too tedious to get into. The point is, however, that I was not at my best, because I was thinking about my lost Miranda and also about the poor schmuck of a musician. No one at the long polished table at which we sat was hairy, nor had any of them ever created anything that any normal person would wish to see or hear. Someone raised the issue of ring tones, and how the EU was going to handle them, and Ed looked at me, because I had done the most extensive work on this and I fumphered and gave what turned out to be the wrong answer and Shelly had to cover for me with an artful equivocation.
In any event, I was out of the office when the fateful call came through and Ms. Maldonado had not left a regular pink printed message slip in my in-basket but rather a yellow Post-it note on my desk lamp, which is what she does when someone calls and we don’t wish to log it in. In most cases this means a mistress (although I am infrequently called by mistresses at the office) but not today. I went out to her desk, flapping the little yellow slip inquiringly, and she said that Miranda Kellogg had called from Toronto. I immediately called the number she gave me and got a voice mailbox at an education ministry office that said Miranda Kellogg was not at her desk and would I like to leave a message? They used the familiar system that generates a machine voice for the body of this polite request, while the name itself is recorded by, presumably, the mailbox’s proprietor. It was a pleasant enough Canadian voice, but one I did not recognize. My belly now commenced churning; I declined to leave a message.
After that, I called the cops and arranged with Detective Murray to have Bulstrode’s files picked up. I sent Omar to do it and waited, during which time I called the Toronto number three times and the third time lucky, the phone picked up and there was the unfamiliar voice, heavier and slower than the voice of the person I had already started to call “my” Miranda. I told her who I was and asked her if she were the niece of the late Andrew B. and she said she was and she had just heard about his demise, having only lately come back to Toronto. She’d been in the Himalayas and quite out of touch. The Himalayas? Yes, she’d won a prize; someone had called her up one night and said she’d won a trip trekking through Nepal. It was either Nepal, Tahiti, or Kenya, your choice, and she’d always wanted to see India and Nepal, so she chose that. At first she’d thought it a scam, but no: a