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came running to us to tell us that Grandpa was lying on the couch
and looking funny. We ran to the living room, and it was obvious
that he had had another stroke. We called the doctor, but it was
clear that his right side was gone entirely. He couldn't speak. He
could move his lips and make sounds, but they came to no words.
"He kept moving his left arm and trying to speak and I said,
'Grandpa, are you trying to tell me something?' He could just
about tremor his head into a small nod. 'About the bonds?' Again a
small nod. 'You want us to have them?' Again a nod and his hand
began to move as though he were trying to point.
"I said, 'Where are they?' His left hand trembled and
continued to point. I couldn't help but say, 'What are you pointing
at, Grandpa?' but he couldn't tell me. His finger just kept pointing
in an anxious, quivering way, and his face seemed in agony as he
tried to talk and failed. I was sorry for him. He wanted to give the
bonds to us, to reward us, and he was dying without being able to.
"My wife, Caroline, was crying and saying, 'Leave him alone,
Simon,' but I couldn't leave him alone. I couldn't let him die in
despair. I said, 'We'll have to move the couch toward whatever it is
he's pointing to.' Caroline didn't want to, but the old man was
nodding his head.
"Caroline got at one end of the couch and I at the other and we
moved it, little by little, trying not to jar him. He was no light-
weight, either. His finger kept pointing, always pointing. He turned
his head in the direction in which we were moving him, making
moaning sounds as though to indicate whether we were moving
him in the right direction or not. I would say, 'More to the right,
Grandpa?' 'More to the left?' And sometimes he would nod.
"Finally, we got him up against the line of bookcases, and
slowly his head turned. I wanted to turn it for him, but I was afraid
to harm him. He managed to get it round and stared at the books
for a long time. Then his finger moved along the line of books till it
pointed toward one particular book. It was a copy of The Complete
Works oj Shakespeare, the Kittredge edition.
"I said, 'Shakespeare, Grandpa?' He didn't answer, he didn't
nod, but his face relaxed and he stopped trying to speak. I suppose
he didn't hear me. Something like a half-smile pulled at the left side
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of his mouth and he died. The doctor came, the body was taken
away, we made arrangements for the funeral. It wasn't till after the
funeral that we went back to the Shakespeare. We figured it would
wait for us and it didn't seem right to grab for it before we took
care of the old man.
"I assumed there would be something in the Shakespeare
volume to tell us where the bonds were, and that's when the first
shock came. We turned through every page,
one by one, and there was nothing there. Not a scrap of paper.
Not a word."
Gonzalo said, "What about the binding? You know, in between
the stuff that glues the pages and the backstrip?"
"Nothing there."
"Maybe someone took it?"
"How? The only ones who knew were myself and Caroline. It
isn't as though there were any robbery. Eventually, we thought
there was a clue somewhere in the book, in the written material, in
the plays themselves, you know. That was Caroline's idea. In the
last two months, I've read every word of Shakespeare's plays;
every word of his sonnets and miscellaneous poems-twice over. I've
gotten nowhere."
"The hell with Shakespeare," said Trumbull querulously.
"Forget the clue. He had to leave them somewhere in the house."
"Why do you suppose that?" said Levy. "He might have put it
in a bank vault for all we know. He got around even after his first
stroke. After we found the bonds in the clothes hamper, he might
have thought the house wasn't safe."
"All right, but he still might have put them in the house
somewhere. Why not just search?"
"We did. Or at least Caroline did. That was how we divided the
labor. She searched the house, which is a big, rambling one--one
reason we could take in Grandpa- and I searched Shakespeare, and
we both came out with nothing."
Avalon untwisted a thoughtful frown and said, "See here,
there's no reason we can't be logical about this. I assume, Simon,
that your grandfather was born in Europe."
"Yes. He came to America as a teen-ager, just as World War I
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was starting. He got out just in time."
"He didn't have much of a formal education, I suppose."
"None at all," said Levy. "He went to work in a tailor shop,
eventually got his own establishment, and stayed a tailor till he
retired. No education at all, except for the usual religious education
Jews gave each other in Tsarist Russia."
"Well, then," said Avalon, "how do you expect him to indicate
clues in Shakespeare's plays? He wouldn't know anything about
them."
Levy frowned and leaned back in his chair. He hadn't touched
the small brandy glass Henry had put in front of him some time
before. Now he picked it up, twirled the stem gently in his fingers,
and put it down again.
"You're quite wrong, Jeff," he said, a little distantly. "He may
have been uneducated but he was quite intelligent and quite well-
read. He knew the Bible by heart, and he'd read War and Peace as
a teen-ager. He read Shakespeare, too. Listen, we once went to see
a production of Hamlet in the park and he got more out of it than I
did."
Rubin suddenly broke in energetically, "I have no intention of
ever seeing Hamlet again till they get a Hamlet who looks as
Hamlet is supposed to look. Fat!"
"Fat!" said Trumbull indignantly.
"Yes, fat. The Queen says of Hamlet in the last scene, 'He's fat,
and scant of breath.' If Shakespeare says Hamlet is fat-"
"That's his mother talking, not Shakespeare. It's the typical
motherly oversolicitousness of a not-bright woman-"
Avalon banged the table. "Not now, gentlemen!"
He turned to Levy. "In what language did your grandfather
read the Bible?"
"In Hebrew, of course," Levy said coldly.
"And War and Peace?"
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