I did not expect this part of it. But I did and do expect the imminent arrival of various parties to l’affaire Bracegirdle. Mickey will come, because he wants to complete the last part of his marvelous scam, but he will not come alone. I am trying, for the record, to recall when I first understood that Mickey was himself the tertium quid we had discussed, the link between Bulstrode and Shvanov. The mind assembles bits 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 he might not have found it at all or, if he had, might at this moment be dead in a shallow English grave.

This had a sobering effect on Mary Peg, but only for a while, and it took all of Crosetti’s jollying skills and Klim’s as well, to bring her back into countenance. The children helped here. Crosetti stayed for supper, which was spaghetti and meatballs (and had been Spg & MB many, many times in the past week, confided Klim), and he marveled at the way a grandparentish milieu had been created from scratch out of what amounted to happenstance. It was the sort of thing that happened all the time in Dickens, Crosetti knew, but he had not looked for it in modern New York. Or perhaps, he thought later, all times were the same, the urge to form families always bubbling up from beneath the surface crud of selfishness. Mary Peg apparently had vast reserves of grandmaternal energies untapped as yet by her natural progeny, all still childless; and Klim had transformed himself into a granddad out of fairy tales: what stories he told, with funny faces, what clever carving of whistles and little toys, what horsey rides, what silly songs he knew, all with pokes and tickles involved! The children, especially the little girl, Molly, had blossomed under this treatment, as children do. They all believe implicitly in magic and think nothing of being carried away from the ogre’s castle to the land of the good fairies.

And Crosetti was happy for them all, but he did feel somewhat extra now, as if this development had confirmed his instinct that his time in his mother’s home was quite over. Besides, there was no room. Besides, it made him uncomfortable to see Rolly staring out at him from her children’s faces. He packed his things, hired a U-Haul trailer for the family car to pull, and was out by the following evening with, however, a check for ten grand from Mishkin that had arrived that morning in a FedEx envelope. No one insisted that he stay.

He was unpacking cartons to music in his new shared loft when he felt his phone vibrating in his pocket. He unplugged his earbuds and put the phone to his cheek.

“Write this down. I have thirty seconds.”

“Carolyn?”

“Write this down. Oh, Christ, you have to help me!” And there followed an address and directions to a lakeside house in the Adirondacks. Crosetti pulled out a ballpoint and scribbled the information on the underside of his left forearm.

“Carolyn, where are you? What the hell is going on?”

“Just come and don’t dial this number. They’re going to kill-” with the rest of the sentence lost in static.

Not good, Crosetti thought, a cliché in fact, especially that business with the call cutting out. The film was going to end on a downer note, bittersweet, tracking the hero returning to his work, maybe the hint of a relationship with the kids, life goes on, or maybe even a hint that Rolly is still alive, a teaser: but not this banal…and he actually kept thinking this way for minutes, stacking books on raw pine shelving, before the reality of the call sank in. Sweat popped out on his face and he had to sit down on the dusty, sprung easy chair he’d scavenged off the street. She really is going to drive me crazy, he thought; no, make that past tense. Okay, I’m game, he thought, I’m an international man of mystery too. What do I need? The Smith & Wesson was back at his mother’s house, and no way was he going back there and explain why he needed it, and now that he thought about actually handling the thing again…no, thanks. But he had hiking boots, check. Richard Widmark black seaman’s sweater, check. Ball cap? No, the watch cap, much better, and the Swiss Army knife, and the grenade launcher…no, just kidding, and the trusty black slicker, still with the mud of Old England on it, wallet, keys, oh, binoculars, can’t forget those, and boy, I’m about as ready as I’ll ever be to face God knows how many heavily armed Russian mobsters…