• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 682 0

of information in its own time and then the revelation. I can’t imagine why I did not immediately see this. Who else could it be? Maybe it was when Oliver March told us the story about how Mickey had treated poor Bulstrode or maybe it was when I learned that Shvanov was a loan shark who had done well out of the market crash, lending money to rich assholes suddenly illiquid. And is not Mickey a rich asshole with money problems? And did I imagine that his wives, in the midst of the sort of arguments Mickey always got into with his wives, would not have, as a sort of marital nuclear strike, confront him with the fact that I had screwed them all, and would that not make him hate me and plan some terrible revenge? Why didn’t I think of all this? Because I had dreamed him up as the Best Friend, of course. The Confidant.

I also must have known at some deep level after our meeting with the forger Pascoe that there was only one person in my ambit who could have come up with the scam he was hired to assist, the world’s premier Shakespeare expert, the only person who had connections with Shvanov, with Bulstrode, with Jake “The Schmuck” Mishkin. He is about to take a bunch of Jewish gangsters for many millions of dollars, and I rather doubt that I can do anything to stop him. In a strange way, he’s like my father: When Izzy says the numbers add up, no one can doubt him. When Mickey says it’s Shakespeare, ditto.

The question remains why I came up to his place in the country rather than really hiding out in one of the zillion anonymous and untraceable places available to a man with a supply of ready cash. Because I am tired of this. I want to be real. I don’t care very much if they kill me but I do want to emerge into the realm of truth before that. Very noble sentiment, Mishkin, but there is one other reason. I realized quite recently that the picture that Miranda presented to me—her hairstyle, her dress, her whole aspect—was designed to be as much like my wife when I first met her as it was possible to contrive. That was what knocked me off my admittedly not very secure perch, that was the inside curveball. And who knew what that distant girl was like, who had seen her innumerable times back then, who had heard from my very lips just what turned me on about her? Why the Best Friend, of course. God, this is banal. Any halfway intelligent future reader of this will have seen it coming long before I did, but isn’t that true to nature, don’t we see everyone else’s secrets but our own, the mote in our brother’s eye? Yes, good old Mickey set me up, and God help me, I hope that as part of his revenge he brings her along. I would like to see her one more time.

22

On the subway, Crosetti could hardly stop laughing to himself, and not entirely to himself, which drew looks from the others in the car. A woman with two small kids in tow changed her seat. Laughing because there he was back on the subway after some weeks of living the high life, private jets and five-star hotels and everything paid for, and having just dropped off what was essentially the budget of Titanic. The ten grand, or maybe even the fifty, would help, though, if he ever got it. No, Mishkin would pay. He was a sleazebag, but not that kind of sleazebag. The money would mean that he could take some time off, work on his screenplay, and, with his savings, just about get through NYU film school.

So he was actually feeling fairly good when he walked into his mother’s house and was unpleasantly surprised by the reception he got. Mary Peg, it turned out, had wanted to see the thing and was outraged that her gormless son had again parted with a treasure, and beyond that, she had told Fanny Dubrowicz that it had been found and she of course was vibrating with anticipation. Fruitlessly did Crosetti explain that at least two independent criminal gangs were searching for it too, and that it was at present about as comfortable an object as an armed nuclear bomb, and in any case Mishkin had paid all the expenses for its recovery and provided protection, in the absence of which