This night he hath a candle late & I heere hym pace his chamber & I listen close & heer the scrach of a pen & shift of paper & I think hee must write oure plaie of Mary now. My lord you ask can I overlook his papers to see what he doth write & I shall try it; but hee is verie close with hys papers & no onne is let see them til he be finished. I praye you my lord doeth well & all your howse prosper, from Stratford-upon-Avon the 19^th June 1611 bye your lordshipes most humble serv^t Richard Bracegirdle

13

I am reading a little Shakespeare now, in the intervals between sleeping, eating, and writing this thing. Mickey’s got a Riverside here, of course, not to mention any number of supplementary texts, lexicons, critical works, and so forth. Shall I add my own little bit of bird shit to Everest? I think not, although I have to say that Bracegirdle has given me a somewhat different take on the guy. As I’ve already said, I have had some commerce with creative types and I have indeed seen in them the same peculiar blankness that our Dick picked up in W.S. Like they’re talking to you and doing business and all but you get the feeling you’re talking not to a regular person but to a fictional character they made up? I just mean writers here; musicians are quite different, like large hairy children.

It so happened, my little diary tells me, that I spent the next morning with a musician whose name you would undoubtedly know if you were rockin’ in the ’80s at all and this fellow had written at least fifteen Top Twenty songs, music and lyrics and (not having taken the precaution of consulting a good IP lawyer) had signed the copyright to these songs over to his label, in return for which the scumbag who owned the label gave him an advance of something like twenty-five grand. And gosh, the scumbag kept feeding him driblets of money, and of course the musician became famous and went on tours and made even more money, and flash forward twenty or so years, with his original group long dispersed and the crowds of fans with them, but the songs are now classics getting tons of airplay on every oldie station in the country and the label scumbag sells his copyrighted list to a media megacorp for close to a billion dollars and what is my guy’s share? Zip is what, the same as what he earns for all those zillions of oldie station plays, because, as practically no one understands, when you hear a song on the radio or TV the artist who’s singing the song gets nothing: only the copyright holder collects the ASCAP royalty.

So I sat down with the megacorp people and they said that while they agreed my client had been screwed to the floorboards, they had just dropped a bundle on what was basically an industrial commodity and the fact that it had arisen from my client’s guts and heart was neither here nor there. The musician took it, I have to say, pretty well. He just grinned and expressed amazement that he’d thought up stuff out of his head that had transformed itself into this huge piece of property, upon which a vast commercial empire now rested, and that he’d have to content himself with all the pleasure he’d given to so many people. As I said, big hairy kids.

In contrast to Shakespeare, who always had a good eye for the bottom line. Sure he sold Hamlet for ten pounds, maybe forty large in today’s money, but he sold it to himself, since he was a stockholder in the theatrical company that owned it, and he probably made a good deal more after old Dick Bracegirdle became his bookkeeper.

I’m digressing again because this next part is really painful.

After I had the bad-news meeting with the hairy former kid I went across town with Ed Geller and Shelly Grossbart to a monster cluster-fuck involving squadrons of lawyers, something that happens a lot nowadays when one media company proposes to buy another and I was there because I know a lot about foreign copyright law and it’s all too tedious to get into. The point is, however, that I was not at my best, because I was thinking about my lost Miranda and also about the poor schmuck of a musician. No one at the long polished table at which we sat was hairy, nor had any of them ever created anything that any normal person would wish to see or hear. Someone raised the issue of ring tones, and how the EU was going to handle them, and Ed looked at me, because I had done the most extensive work on this and I fumphered and gave what turned out to be the wrong answer and Shelly had to cover for me with an artful equivocation.

In any event, I was out of the office when the fateful call came through and Ms. Maldonado had not left a regular pink printed message slip in my in-basket but rather a yellow Post-it note on my desk lamp, which is what she does when someone calls and we don’t wish to log it in. In most cases this means a mistress (although I am infrequently called by mistresses at the office) but not today. I went out to her desk, flapping the little yellow slip inquiringly, and she said that Miranda Kellogg had called from Toronto. I immediately called the number she gave me and got a voice mailbox at an education ministry office that said Miranda Kellogg was not at her desk and would I like to leave a message? They used the familiar system that generates a machine voice for the body of this polite request, while the name itself is recorded by, presumably, the mailbox’s proprietor. It was a pleasant enough Canadian voice, but one I did not recognize. My belly now commenced churning; I declined to leave a message.

After that, I called the cops and arranged with Detective Murray to have Bulstrode’s files picked up. I sent Omar to do it and waited, during which time I called the Toronto number three times and the third time lucky, the phone picked up and there was the unfamiliar voice, heavier and slower than the voice of the person I had already started to call “my” Miranda. I told her who I was and asked her if she were the niece of the late Andrew B. and she said she was and she had just heard about his demise, having only lately come back to Toronto. She’d been in the Himalayas and quite out of touch. The Himalayas? Yes, she’d won a prize; someone had called her up one night and said she’d won a trip trekking through Nepal. It was either Nepal, Tahiti, or Kenya, your choice, and she’d always wanted to see India and Nepal, so she chose that. At first she’d thought it a scam, but no: a package had come in the mail the next day, Airborne Express, containing all the tickets and arrangements, but she had to leave that week or no deal. I asked her when that was, and she told me six weeks ago more or less; that is, early October, just before Bulstrode had returned to the United States. In any case, she’d read about her uncle’s death upon her return and thought she should call, even though she imagined the body would be going back to Oxford and Oliver. She said she didn’t think that there was any money involved, since she knew her silly old uncle was broke, but would I give her a buzz when I’d read the will? She thought that most of what he had would go to Oliver, but there was a lavaliere that had belonged to her grandmother that she’d been promised. I said I would and hung up, the phone slipping into its cradle on a film of my sweat.

I immediately called our estate law section and left an urgent message for Jasmine Ping. I sweated some more and tried to get interested in IP law but could not, even though I had to get a response ready for that Godzilla-eating-Rodan media merger business from the morning, no, the words would not cling to the appropriate brain tissue, and then in comes Omar with large brown cartons under each arm and I thrash through them and find a copy of the real last will and testament of Andrew Bulstrode rather than the phony one that my Miranda had presented. This, as the real Miranda had indicated, left all worldly goods to Oliver March, the longtime companion, aside from some small bequests to individuals, and I was happy to learn that the real Miranda would get her lavaliere. The box also held a small leather-framed desk photograph of Professor Bulstrode with a younger woman who possessed the squat, pleasantly froggy look that was perhaps a mark of the Bulstrodes and who I presumed was the echt Miranda Kellogg.