The Book of Air and Shadows Read Free Page B

This was more weight than I had ever lifted in the clean-and-jerk and would have got me the bronze medal, but I messed up on the snatch, and Joe Dube took it. I have kept up training since then, at a lower level, of course, but I can still yank somewhat more than a quarter of a ton over my head.
    A perfectly useless skill, which is why I like it, why I took it up. I started at ten with a set of homemade weights and lifted all through high school and college. At present I’m a hair over six feet two and I weigh two-fifty, more or less, eighteen-inch neck, fifty-two chest, and the rest to match. Many people take me for a fat person, which I certainly am not. Since the coming of Arnold, people tend to confuse the use of weights to sculpt the body with competitive weight lifting. They are completely different enterprises. Weight lifters almost never have cut or pretty bodies, which are in any case more to do with the absence of subcutaneous fat than with strength. Any serious heavy-class weight lifter could break Mr. Universe over his knee. Only potentially, of course: I have found it to be the case that large, strong people are mild of temperament unless they are into steroids, which is more and more common nowadays, I fear. I remain nonsteroidally mild, however.
    I see I have drifted yet again. I was just trying to set myself in my office on the relevant day, which was quite an ordinary one, the morning spent at a meeting about Chinese T-shirt piracy of a rock album image, an increasing part of the normal practice of IP law. Quiet meetings, billable hours, the marshaling of expertise, and the delicate suggestion that lawsuits in this business are largely a waste of time, for Chinese piracy of rock album cover images is an unavoidable cost of doing business in our fallen world. I returned to my own office after this meeting-it was about twenty minutes to twelve and I was already looking forward to lunch-but as I passed my secretary’s desk she hailed me. My secretary is Ms. Olivia Maldonado, a young woman both decorative and competent. Many in the office lust after her, as do I, but it is an iron rule here at Geller Linz Grossbart & Mishkin that we don’t screw around with the staff, a rule I entirely support. It was nearly the sole instance of my forbearance in that department, and I was stupidly proud of it.
    I recall she was wearing an outfit I particularly liked, a gray skirt, somewhat clingy, and a dusky rose cardigan sweater with the top two buttons open. Pearl buttons. Her shiny dark hair was wound up on her head and clasped with an amber comb, exposing a small brown beauty mark on the base of her neck, and she had the scent of iris faintly about her.
    There was a man waiting to see me, I learned; he had no appointment, could I squeeze him in? A Mr. Bulstrode. Walk-ins are rare in our business-it’s not as if we’re upstairs from the bail bondsman-and I was intrigued.
    I went into my office and sat behind my desk and shortly Ms. M. showed the fellow in, man with a briefcase. Bulstrode had dressed his portly form in a brownish three-piece suit of well-worn tweeds and wore tortoiseshell spectacles on his little marshmallow of a nose. Worn Burberry draped over arm, good oxblood shoes on his feet and a paisley square in the breast pocket; thin snuff-colored hair moderately long and combed across the scalp, a little vanity there. His face was flushed, up from the neck and across the cheeks. He blinked colorless lashes at me as we shook hands (soft, dampish). I thought “professor” and I was correct: he introduced himself as Andrew Bulstrode, a professor indeed, late of Oxford in the U.K. and visiting at Columbia. Professor Haas good enough to give me your name…
    I sat him and after the usual chat asked what I could do for him. He said he wanted some IP advice. I said he’d come to the right place. Asked if he could put me a hypothetical. I don’t like hypotheticals because when the client talks in hypotheticals it