The Book of Air and Shadows - Michael Gruber [2]
Perhaps, though, I am being too diffident. The legal profession is not without its creative side. We do a lot of writing, nearly all of it of interest only to other lawyers, but still there is the business of telling a story, setting a scene, laying out the facts and assumptions behind one’s case. Young Charles Dickens started out as a court reporter, and scholars believe that this experience formed the sense of the human drama evident in his novels. Besides which, those novels are nearly all about crimes, mainly of the white-collar type. Mickey Haas is my source for that factoid, and he should know, as he is a professor of English literature at Columbia. And he is also the beginning of this story.
How much do you need to know about Mickey? Well, first of all you know something, because only a certain type of mature man allows himself to be called by a schoolboy diminutive nickname. I don’t believe that “Jake” is a nickname of the same type at all. He is certainly my oldest friend, but he is not entirely a serious person. Perhaps if he were a more serious person he would have shined the little professor on, and this business would not have occurred. Fittingly, therefore, I have ended up at Mickey’s house, a cabin on Lake Henry deep in Adirondack State Park, where I am currently in…I suppose I am hiding out, but I can hardly bring myself to use such a dramatic term. In seclusion, let us say. Armed seclusion, let us say.
I have known Mickey (or Melville C. Haas, as it appears on the spines of his many books) since my youth, starting from our sophomore year at Columbia, when I answered an ad asking for a roommate to share a fourth-floor walk-up on 113th Street off Amsterdam Avenue. It is typical of Mickey that the ad was posted in the window of a Chinese laundry on Amsterdam rather than at the student union or with the university housing office. When I asked him later why he’d done that, he replied that he wished to solicit roommates from the subpopulation that wore professionally cleaned and ironed shirts. Oddly enough I was not really of that population; I owned a single dress shirt, a white-on-white De Pinna discarded by my father, and had gone into the little shop to have it pressed for a job interview.
At the time I was living in a greasy single-room-occupancy building, having recently run away from home. I was eighteen and grindingly poor, and the SRO was charging me fifteen bucks a day, kitchen and bath down the hall. Both of these rooms stank, in different but equally unpleasant ways, nor was the stench contained within either. So I was a little desperate, and it was a nice apartment, a two-bedroom with a partial view of the cathedral, and while dark in the manner of such long-hall uptown apartments, it was reasonably clean, and Mickey seemed a decent enough guy. I had seen him on campus before this, for he was a noticeable fellow: big, nearly as big as me, red-haired, with the pendulous lip and the protuberant, hooded blue eyes of one of the lesser Habsburgs. He wore tweed jackets and flannel pants and, in cold weather, an enveloping genuine Royal Navy duffel coat in camel, and he spoke in the precise, charmingly hesitant, anglophiliac accents we heard from those of Columbia’s famous English lit professors who were unfortunate enough to have been born in the USA.
Despite these affectations, Mickey was, like most of New York’s sophisticates and unlike me, a hick. He came from—I can’t for the life of me recall the name of the place. Not Peoria, but like that. Kenosha. Ashtabula. Moline, maybe. One of those midsize midwestern industrial cities. Anyway, as he told me at that first