“Maybe. But if Haas died it can’t be a comedy.”

“You know, you would be perfect too if you didn’t have that habit of making everything into a movie. If I stop lying and running away will you stop doing that?”

“Deal,” he said and kissed her cold lips, thinking: fade to black, music up, roll credits.

23

I found this document while I was transferring files to my new laptop and have decided to add this coda. Clearly, the public end of this affair-the lost play, the miraculous Bracegirdle-Shakespeare mss., the involvement of Shvanov, the scene at the cabin, the fate of Mickey Haas-has been too heavily reported to bear repeating here, but I do want to tie up my own loose ends, so that, if some digital explorer of the future comes across this file, as we did poor Bracegirdle’s last letter, there will be some closure.

Sorry to say, Amalie and I are not, as of the current date, which is June 10, back together, although I still have hopes. She is often in the city, and when she is we are much together and fairly amicable. We attended Easter services this year at St. Patrick’s and it affected me deeply, and she noted this, and she gave me a smile such as I have not had from her for a good while. And I suppose it was also because I am entering the eighth month of the longest period of celibacy I have experienced since Miss Polansky had me in the staff room of the Farragut Branch library. Amalie can no longer smell (or sense in some more mystic way) the taint of adultery on me, and it is, I think, bringing her around. I believe that my curse began lifting at the very moment, in the cold water of Lake Henry, that Crosetti drew my attention to the fact that I was trying to save a mythical woman rather than my children. And the sight of my daughter risking her own life to save her brother, whom I thought she despised. This event put into my mind that I might be wrong about every single emotional relationship in my purview, and that I should, instead of trying to be clever, simply pump out as much love from my tiny store as I could, whether or not it is reciprocated. This I have tried to do.

I am also happy to say that I attended my daughter’s performance in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (a smash, by the way, she stole the show) without nausea, and while I will perhaps never be a theater aficionado, that particular neurotic tic seems to be over. I spend a good deal of time with Niko, mainly sitting quietly with him, but a few months ago he asked if I would teach him to swim, and also to lift weights. He will still not look directly at me, but sometimes, when I touch him, he does not shrink away.

Paul is back in his mission, properly humbled and terribly affected by the death of Mickey Haas, although I have told him repeatedly that this was my fault and not his. All I had to do was call the police and tell them the whole story, and they would have investigated, and Pascoe’s lies would have surfaced immediately and everything would have worked out fine, the letters and play authenticated, etc. That Pascoe! A Yank priest shows up and asks if he knows anything about a forged unknown play by Shakespeare and of course he says, Oh, yes, Father, done it myself, didn’t I, and for fifty grand I’ll tell you the whole thing. And Paul fell for it; I suppose there is such a thing as being too clever, too suspicious.

Miri has left her business, which I have to say here for the record was a high-class call girl ring. Shvanov was deeply involved in it, of course, and his arrest has done her a world of good. She is much with Paul now, doing good works. She still looks fabulous and wears a jeweled crucifix at all times and with all her outfits.

Dad was able to slip away in his characteristic fashion, and I find that, after seeing him again, he is not the cancer on my spirit that he once was. Do I believe the version of my past he conveyed to me in that limo? Perhaps. It hardly matters at this point. I suppose I have forgiven him.

I miss Mickey Haas. Even a dreamed-up best pal is better than no best pal at all. All three of the wives showed up at the funeral and all of us were as phony and civilized as could be. In the end he was true to his profession and to his artistic judgment, literally going through fire to save his Precious. How many members of the Modern Language Association could say the same?

Crosetti seems to be doing well. I ran into him and Carolyn Rolly with the two children a week or so ago on Canal just east of Lafayette. It was a Saturday, and I had just finished a dim sum lunch with a couple of guys I went to law school with who were visiting town, and I was on the street looking for Omar and the Lincoln when they hove into view. We chatted briefly and a little awkwardly. Carolyn has washed the camouflaging dark out of her hair, for the blond she showed me as Miranda is her natural color and her eyes are bright blue, not the grape green she had assumed via tinted contacts in homage to Amalie’s. There is not the slightest residual attraction. They live together in darkest arty Brooklyn, in a very nice loft bought by the sale of the Bracegirdle mss., and he has sold his script about the Bracegirdle affair, helped, I imagine, by the immense publicity surrounding the case. He thinks John Cusack will actually play him in the movie, although William Hurt is unfortunately not available for me.

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.