The Book of Air and Shadows - Michael Gruber [228]
I told him what I was doing at work and will now tell this record, which was and is working on the immense IP case occasioned by Mary Queen of Scotland by William S. The actual ms. is part of the evidence in People v. Shvanov (murder and kidnap) and has been temporarily sequestered in a municipal vault, but as soon as I’d received it from Crosetti I had taken the liberty of securing the thing digitally, transmuting the pages into pure intellectual property, a string of words. I am naturally not the lawyer of record, since I am a principal claimant to the IP; Ed Geller is my man on it, and we are all pals again. We are mainly fighting the British crown for the rights, and so I am now one with G. Washington and the other Founding Fathers. Should the case be decided in my favor I will perhaps for the first time be wealthier than my wife, and as I mentioned this possibility on that busy street, I felt a pang of guilt. This is my new moral sense, and I fear it will sharply limit my professional practice. I proposed to Crosetti that he and Carolyn deserved a big chunk of any value accruing from the sale or rights to the play, and that they should stop by the office and discuss this matter, and then Omar swooped across three lanes and pulled neatly to the curb. I asked if I could give them a lift and they said it was Brooklyn and I said no matter, and I could see in the flash of a look that passed between them that they did not care to spend that much social time with me. So I insisted, just for form’s sake, and Crosetti said, “Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown,” and I said, “I bet you’ve waited ten years to say that in real life,” and he laughed and we all of us laughed at that.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The author would like to thank Thomas D. Selz, Esq., of Frankfurt Kurnit Klein & Selz for his help explaining the mysteries of intellectual property law and for the view from his office, other than which he has not a thing in common with the intellectual property lawyer depicted in this novel.
About the Author
MICHAEL GRUBER has been a marine biologist, a restaurant cook, a federal government official, and a political speechwriter. He lives in Seattle, Washington, and is currently at work on another novel.
www.michaelgruberbooks.com
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ALSO BY MICHAEL GRUBER
Night of the Jaguar
Valley of Bones
Tropic of Night
The Witch’s Boy
Credits
Jacket design by Patti Ratchford
Jacket illustration by Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
THE BOOK OF AND SHADOWS. Copyright © 2007 by Michael Gruber. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
ePub edition February 2007 ISBN 9780061739538
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