I relate this to demonstrate my near-perfect insensitivity to the interior states of my dear ones, which I suppose is a key to some aspects of this story. I really had no idea at all, although I saw poor Mutti nearly every week. Yes, Ermentrude played her cards pretty close, but still, shouldn’t I have suspected something? Some terminal depression? I did not, nor was there a note. Forty-four years old.
Earlier, before I entered my terrible puberty, we were unusually close. During my ninth year, by some happy coincidence, I had an early school day and my mother had moved to the late shift at her hospital, so we met and had biweekly Oedipal Theater. She would bake treats for me on those days, marvelous Bavarian delights rich with nuts, cinnamon, raisins, stuffed into leaf pastry thin as hope, and the smell would hit my nose in the hallway as I left the urine-stinking elevator, like a presagement of paradise. And we would talk, or she would talk, mainly reminiscences of her girlhood, her marvelous girlhood in the New Germany-the music, the parades, how beautiful the men looked in their uniforms, how wonderful her father, how kind everyone was to her. She actually served as one of those little blondies you see in old newsreels presenting a bouquet to the Führer on an official visit. It was set up through her dad’s contacts in the Party, and she recalled every detail, how proud she was, how the Führer had cupped her little face in his hand and patted her cheek. Yes, the cheek I kissed every day. Lucky Jake!
About the bad stuff that came later, not so much talking. I don’t like sinking about zose days, she said, only of zhe happy times I like to sink. But I pressed and learned about the rats and the flies, the absence of pets, the smell, what it was like to be bombed from the air, more about the smells, the exploded bodies of her friends and their parents, the peculiar juxtapositions created by blast, the bathtub blown through a schoolhouse wall and resting on the teacher’s desk. How the children laughed!
When I cleaned out her stuff I found a trove of family memorabilia that she’d never shown us, but which she must have been carrying around in her suitcase when she met Dad: letters home from the various fronts, photographs of the family, school certificates, vacation postcards. It included a good deal of Nazi stuff, of course, awards from the SS, my grandfather’s various medals, and the rosewood presentation case for the pistol. One photograph in particular I rescued and later had framed, and it is still in my bedroom. It is of her family, just before the war started, at some beach resort. She’s about ten or eleven, lovely as a nymph, and the two older brothers are there in their old-fashioned knit bathing suits, grinning blondly into the sun, and my grandmother is looking quite svelte in a one-piece suit, reclining in a deck chair and laughing; and leaning over her, sharing the joke, is the then Hauptsturmführer-SS Stieff. He has obviously just come to the beach from work, for he is in tie and shirtsleeves and carrying his tunic, accoutrements and hat, and unless you look very carefully, you can’t see what kind of uniform it is.
I like this picture because of how happy they all look, although they lived under the worst regime in human history and the father of the family worked for an organization bent on genocide. In contrast, there are no such pictures of my family, for although we had our laughs, my father was not into photography, and, unlike his late father-in-law, had a positive horror of being captured on film. The only family pictures we have are stilted department store poses taken on our birthdays or else records of events-first communions, graduations, and so on, plus many snapshots taken by neighbors or strangers, for, as I have suggested, with the exception of myself, my family is unusually photogenic.
No, let’s tear ourselves away from the distant past (if only!) and back to the main story. Miranda and I agreed that she could not be left alone. I made arrangements for Omar to come by and exercise his protective skills, and further arranged that he should stay over and add a little firepower in case they tried anything else once they found that the briefcase lacked what they wanted. This left the question of why Russian-speaking toughs had become interested in Richard Bracegirdle’s personal history. Could Bulstrode have had some original connection with them? I asked Miranda and she looked at me like I was crazy. Uncle Andrew hardly knew anyone in New York aside from scholars, and he had never so much as mentioned any Russians, criminal or otherwise. Freelance thugs then? More likely. Despite the fictions of TV, organized crime has become somewhat more Russian in the past few decades: the Mafiya, so called, but not by the Russians. Someone looking for frighteners, strong-arm guys, torturers, had found a contractor. Who this person was remained obscure, but finding him (as I now explained to Miranda) was not our job. What we had to do was keep her safe, which I thought Omar could handle, and turn the recent developments over to the police.
Around eight, a fellow called Rashid came by from a hire agency to drive me to work. I left Omar in the loft with Miranda, with instructions not to let her out of his sight, and I cut short his eager description of how well armed he was. I didn’t want to know. At the office, I called Detective Murray and related what had happened the previous night. He asked if I had the license plate of the car and I said I hadn’t and he said he didn’t see that there was much that he could do about the loss of a briefcase, and he’d transfer me to an officer who’d give me a case number for my insurance. I got a little steamed at that and pointed out that this incident must be related to the murder of Andrew Bulstrode, which he was supposed to be investigating, and there was a pause on the line after which the detective asked with heavy patience how I figured that. And then I told him about Ms. Kellogg and how someone with an accent was trying to get an old manuscript from her, one that Bulstrode had owned, and how the men who had attacked us had spoken in what seemed like Russian, and it had to be all connected. He asked me what this manuscript was worth and I told him Bulstrode had bought it for a couple of thousand dollars, but…
And here I checked, because all beyond that was speculation, all the Shakespeare business, and I knew how it would sound to a New York cop, and so I concluded the conversation rather lamely and suffered being put on hold and, when at last unheld, reported the petty mugging to a bored man and received my case number. Then I called J. Ping and got the scoop on the status of Bulstrode’s will, with which she saw no obvious trouble, perfectly straightforward, a month should see it through surrogate’s court, and asked me if there was any big rush on, and I said, no, quite the contrary, no rush at all. The decedent’s body, I learned, was due to be flown out that day, in care of one Oliver March, presumably the longtime companion I had heard about.
I skipped lunch that day, my diary says, and went to the gym, although it was not my regular gym day. I wished to talk to someone about Russians, and the gym was as good a place to do that as I had at my disposal. When I arrived, however, it was Arkady who wanted to talk to me. He took me into his tiny office, a cluttered industrial-carpeted place with hardly room for a desk and a few chairs, which desk was nearly invisible under a mass of lifting magazines and defective lumps of gear and samples of diet supplements, some of them even legal for use in Olympic events. There was a glass case in the office holding Arkady’s remarkable array of medals and cups-the old U.S.S.R. certainly did not stint its darlings-and the walls were plastered with many more triumphant photos than I owned myself. Arkady Demichevski is squat and hairy, with deep-set small brown eyes and a twenty-inch neck. He looks like an early hominid but is a civilized, cultured, and kind man, with a good sense of humor. Today he was uncharacteristically solemn.