The Book of Air and Shadows - Michael Gruber [193]
After some long seconds, I rasped into the instrument, “Are you fucking my wife, you guinea son of a bitch?” quite loud enough to turn heads at nearby tables in the Dorchester’s elegant breakfast room.
To which he answered, in a shocked tone, “What? Of course not. I’m with Carolyn Rolly.”
“Rolly? When did she turn up?”
“In Oxford. She’s on the lam from Shvanov’s people.”
“And you decided to shelter her with my wife and children, you asshole!”
“Calm down, Jake. I thought it was a good move. Why should they look for her in Zurich? Or me, for that matter? Meanwhile, there’ve been some developments….”
“I hate this! Get out of there and go someplace else!” Incredibly stupid, I know, but the idea of Crosetti sharing a house with Amalie got under my skin.
“Fine, we’ll stay at a hotel. Look, do you want to hear this…it’s important.”
Grumpily, I told him to spit it out. It was quite a story. The long and short was that Rolly had smuggled a copy of the grille away from the bad guys and they had been able to decipher the spy letters. I am trying to recall what I felt when I heard this and I suppose the answer is, not that much, because I knew the whole thing was a fraud. I told him to e-mail me a copy of the decipher and asked, “So, does it locate the play?”
“It says he buried his copy, and waits for an answer from Rochester. He was double-crossing Dunbarton and wanted to use the play as proof of the plot. He may have gotten his answer and dug up the play and then who knows what happened to it?”
“Wait a second—one of the ciphered letters was to someone else?”
“Yeah, the Earl of Rochester, the man Dunbarton was conspiring against. Dunbarton apparently got caught plotting and decided to cover his tracks by whacking both Bracegirdle and the Bard. Bracegirdle panicked and tried to rifle the playhouse strongbox to fund his getaway, got caught, confessed all to Shakespeare, and they decided to blow the whistle. There’re some pages missing from this letter but it’s still pretty clear. Shakespeare knew some high-level people who could vouch for the whole thing and they wrote the letter in the same cipher.”
“And they weren’t afraid that Dunbarton might get hold of it and read it?”
“No, that’s the beauty of his cipher: all you needed was a grille, which is easy to copy, and a reference to a page in the Breeches Bible and you’re all set, but unless you have the page to start on you’re out of luck. He must’ve hand-delivered the grille, the ciphered letter, and the page reference to one of Rochester’s people and…”
I didn’t care about the details and said so, adding, “So we still don’t have the whereabouts of the play?”
“No. He wrote that he has the directions where they’ll be safe, whatever that means. Apparently you also need that range finder he invented.”
“Oh, good. I’ll check out Portobello Road. So that’s it? A dead end.”
“It looks like it, boss, unless someone has retained a trove of Bracegirdliana. On the other hand, this is still the biggest find for Shakespeare scholarship since forever. It should be worth a bundle to the Folger.”
“Yes. And what are your plans now?”
“Back to New York, I guess. Carolyn owns the ciphers, so she’ll want to sell them. Amalie said you knew a big-time Shakespeare scholar….”
“I do. Mickey Haas—what about him?”
“Well, maybe you could ask him to handle the sale—in exchange for first look and all that.”
“I’d be glad to. And if you want to return with me, we’ll be leaving late on Thursday, day after tomorrow, from Biggin Hill. And, Crosetti? Forget about what I said about Amalie and about leaving the house. I’m a little nuts nowadays.”
Why didn’t I tell him at that moment that it was a fraud? I can’t recall, but it must have been the fear that if I short-circuited the denouement of the scam I would not get to see Miranda again. Perhaps more than a little nuts.
I went to my meetings, had my flirt, as I’ve said, and a charming dinner with Miss Whoever-Someone, but I put her in a cab with a mere handshake,