She was frankly crying now, not hysterical yet as she was the night before, but building up to it, and that was something Crosetti had no wish to see again. He said, “Hey, calm down! You can’t take what chance?”
“The cops. I can’t be involved with the police.”
Lightbulb.
“You’re a fugitive.” It wasn’t a question. Obvious, really; he should have picked it up right off the bat.
She nodded.
“What’s the charge?”
“Oh, please! Don’t interrogate me!”
“You didn’t whack Uncle Lloyd?”
“What? No, of course not. It was some stupid dope thing. I was desperate for money and I moved packages for some people I knew. This was in Kansas, so of course the sky fell in and…oh, God, what am I going to do!”
“Okay, get yourself together,” he said, resisting the urge to wrap his arms around her. “Go back in there, and tell him it’s a deal.”
He started to move away and her face stiffened in what seemed like panic; he was happy to note that she clutched at his arm, as at a plank in a shipwreck.
“Where’re you going?”
“I just need to do something first,” he said. “Don’t worry, Carolyn, it’s going to be fine. I’ll be back in ten minutes.”
“What should I tell him?” she demanded.
“Tell him I got the runs from the excitement of his generous offer and I’m in the bathroom. Ten minutes!”
He turned and raced down the stairs, three at a time, holding the rolled manuscripts under his arm like a football. Out of Hamilton at a run, he threaded through a quad full of strolling young people who had higher SATs than he did and ran into the vast columned bulk of Butler Library. One advantage of having a well-known research librarian for a mother is that she knows nearly all the other research librarians in the city and is pals with a number of them. Crosetti had known Margaret Park, the head research librarian at Butler, since childhood, and it was an easy matter to call her up and get permission. All big libraries have large-format Xerox machines that can reproduce folio pages; Crosetti used the one in the Butler basement to copy all of Bracegirdle’s papers. He explained to the bemused but amenable Mrs. Park that this was all to do with a movie he had a chance to make (somewhat true) and could he also cadge a mailing tube and buy some stamps?
He rolled the copies into their tube and added the originals of the ciphered letters and the sermons. As he did this, he wondered why he hadn’t shown them to Bulstrode along with the Bracegirdle letter. Because the guy was an asshole and he was screwing him in some way on this deal, although Crosetti couldn’t prove it, and besides there was Carolyn to consider. But keeping the ciphers to himself gave him an obscure pleasure. Shakespeare or not, the sheets had kept their secrets for four centuries and he was reluctant to let them out of his own hands, he who had brought them into the light. He sealed the tube, wrote out an address label, added postage, dropped the tube into the outgoing mail cart, and trotted back to Hamilton Hall.
Fifteen minutes later he was walking with Rolly down the center of campus again, but in the opposite direction. Crosetti had a check for thirty-five hundred folded in his wallet and was feeling not exactly good, because he felt he’d been ripped off in a number of ways, but that he’d done the right thing. Doing the right thing had been a major expression around the house while he was being raised. His father had been a detective second grade with the NYPD in an era when to be a detective was to be on the pad, but Charlie Crosetti had not been on the pad, and had suffered for it, until the revelations of Serpico, when the chiefs had cast around for the straight and clean, and found him and promoted him to lieutenant in command of a Queens homicide squad. This was taken as a sign in the Crosetti household that virtue was rewarded. The present Crosetti still tended to believe this, despite all the evidence to the contrary that had accumulated in the years since. The woman walking beside him, however, seemed to set the moral universe on its ear. Yes, she’d been hideously abused (or so she said) but had responded with a kind of desperate amorality, a stance he found hard to condone. Every skell has a hard-luck story, his dad used to say. But he could not consider Carolyn Rolly a mere skell. Why not? His gonads? Because he lusted for her? No, not that either, or not only that. He wanted to ease her pain, make her grin, release the girl he glimpsed hiding under the dour, ascetic bookbinder.
He studied her trudging along, silent, her head down, gripping her roll of book leather. No, he was not going to end it with a handshake at the subway and let her roll off into her own astringent universe again. He stopped and placed his hand on her arm. She looked up, her face blank.
“Wait,” he said, “what are we doing now?”
“I have to go to the paper guy in Brooklyn for the endpapers,” she replied glumly. “You don’t have to come.”
“That can wait. What we’re actually going to do now is go to the Citibank branch over there, on which this check in my wallet is drawn, and cash it. Then we’re going to cab to Bloomie’s, where I will buy a jacket and pants and a shirt and maybe a pair of Italian loafers, and you will buy a dress, with colors in it, something for the summer, and maybe a hat, and we’ll change into our new clothes and we’ll take a cab to a fancy restaurant and have a long, long lunch with wine, and then we’ll-I don’t know-do city stuff, go to museums or art galleries or window-shop until we get hungry again and then go out to dinner and then I will take you in a cab back to your spare and illegal loft and your two chairs and your lonely bed.”
What was that on her face, he wondered: fear, surprise, delight? She said, “That’s ridiculous.”
“No it’s not. It’s exactly what felons are supposed to do with their ill-gotten gains. You can be my moll for a day.”
“You’re not a felon.”
“I am. I converted my employer’s property to my own use, probably grand larceny if you want to get technical. But I don’t care. Come on, Carolyn! Don’t you ever get tired of grunging around, squeezing every penny while your youth withers a little every day?”
“I can’t believe I’m hearing this,” she said. “It sounds like a bad movie.”
“But you don’t go to movies, so how would you know? Putting that aside, you happen to be absolutely right. This is exactly the kind of thing they put in movies, because they want people to feel joy, they want people to identify with beautiful people having fun. And now we’re going to do it, we’re going to imitate art, we’re going to be in our own movie and see what it’s like in real life.”
He could see that she was thinking about it, testing it, as we do with a limb lately out of a cast, gingerly, afraid to let it take the weight. “No,” she said, “and if the money’s burning a hole in your pocket why don’t you just give it all to me? I could live for three months on-”
“No, that’s not the point, Carolyn. The point is experience, for once, not prudence, red meat not ramen fucking noodles!” With that he grabbed her arm and hustled her across 116th Street.
“Let go of my arm!”
“No, if you won’t come along of your own free will, I’m kidnapping you. This is now a major felony.”
“What if I scream?” she said.
“Scream away. The cops will arrest me, and they’ll get the whole old book and manuscript story out of me, and then where will you be? Up shit’s creek is where, instead of dressed in a gorgeous new dress drinking champagne in a fine restaurant. You better choose right now, baby, because here’s the bank.”
He found a cocoa silk-and-linen Varvatos jacket on sale for three-fifty and some linen slacks and a nubbly black silk shirt and woven Italian loafers to go with it and she was yelled and chivied into a Prada ruffle-front flowered dress, a matching silk scarf and shoes, a couple of sets of devastating La Perla underwear, and a big panama hat with an upturned brim like an English schoolgirl, all of which did not leave much change from a thousand bucks, and then they had lunch at the Metropolitan Museum and took in the Velázquez show and then went to an afternoon concert at the Frick that he happened to know about because his mom had tickets from her library mafia and had pressed them upon him (go, take a date!), another example of magic, because he’d been carrying the damn things around in his wallet for two weeks with no intention of going and now here it was that very afternoon. So they went, and it was the Concerto Vocale doing a program of Monteverdi sacred music. They sat in folding chairs and were lifted, to the extent their spiritual development then permitted, up to the divine regions.