The Forgers (21 page)

Like some family pet, the mongrel was sitting on the top step of the front porch when I swung back into the drive. My headlights caught his eyes which, startlingly, shone silvery white, or like mercury, eyes that were empty holes. More defiant than fearful—he had never come after me, only shuffled away when I'd shouted—I got out and slammed the car door shut, assuming that would frighten him off. Oddly, it didn't. As I walked toward the porch, I realized that any ire I felt toward this dog was misplaced. He held his ground until I was close enough to either pet or else kick him, and finally snarled at me, warning that I do neither. When I saw he was lording over a slab of fresh meat that was set before him, circumstances became clearer. Dumb pawn, I thought, and looked behind me, scanning the gloaming fields and back up the driveway.

A figure was walking my way, I saw, a hundred yards off on the dirt road that led to the drive.

“Meghan?” I shouted, hopefully. Seeing that she seemed not to have heard, I turned back to the dog and said, quietly, “What can I do for you?”

Almost as if he understood or made his move on cue, the beast snatched up his hunk of beef or lamb or whatever it was and walked, then loped, then sprinted silently across the lawn, disappearing into the forest.

I turned once more to glance down toward the still indistinct figure coming closer, and called out again, “Meghan?”

“Hey,” she cried back, her voice a more welcome sound than I might care to admit.

Stepping across the porch, I unlocked the door and switched on the light. In my peripheral vision I noticed that just next to where the dog had been sitting lay an unmarked envelope which, in a single motion, I stooped down, picked up, and slipped in my coat pocket, all the while praying Meghan hadn't noticed. The crunch of her footfalls on the peastone gravel sounded like an old man rhythmically rasping, maybe coughing out his death rattle or else softly chuckling.

“What are you doing out here in your coat?” she asked with a smile as she climbed the couple of porch steps and gave me a kiss.

“Me? Oh, that dog was back here barking and I came out to shoo him off.”

“Well, he's becoming a nuisance,” she said, as she stepped inside and removed her mackintosh. “Maybe we ought to ask around, see if any of the neighbors knows his owner. We certainly don't want him prowling around here when the baby comes.”

I remained on the porch for a moment, gazing at the fully darkened scape outside, whose shapes and borders were now dulled by nightfall.

“You coming inside? You're letting in all the cold.”

“Sure, sorry,” I said, before backing inside and bolting the door. I agreed with her about the dog, and promised I would make some enquiries the next day.

S
OMETIMES I WONDERED
why Slader didn't simply go to the police or, even worse, to Meghan directly, make his bold accusations, and be done with it. This was my nightmare scenario, naturally, and, as such, one I pictured the man would find most appealing. But the only profit from that course of action was revenge, not money, and Slader, for all the complexities of the relationship I sensed he had with Adam Diehl, was motivated principally by filthy lucre, the god-almighty buck. It was a pretty conventional shortcoming, I understood, for such an otherwise twisted psyche.

His letter, which I read downstairs after Meghan had gone to bed, proposed—well, truth to tell, demanded—a meeting. All rather civilized, he wanted to have a late lunch at the hotel restaurant where he had been staying, coincidentally on Henry Street right near the center of the village. The letter, this time dispensing with Yeats's holograph and written in the block letters of any schoolboy, went on to say,

This shouldn't present too much of a difficulty for you, I wouldn't think, as it is just across the street from your place of employment. Yes, I chose it for just that reason. I must tell you how much I admire your punctuality coming to and going from work. The underlying responsibility inherent in showing up on time gives me hope that you and I will be able to find a solution to our problems and stick to that solution as if it was law. Because it must be, you know.

For all that he was a raving psycho, I couldn't help but respect his persistence and audacity. And, bizarre as it may sound, I climbed upstairs to join my wife in bed with a weight lifted off my shoulders. Settling my head on the pillow, I was grateful that some end was possibly in sight, and that despite Slader's verbal swagger and menacing stunts with the poor half-wit dog it seemed possible he wanted to strike a civilized business deal with me. Why meet in an elegant old hotel restaurant if he had another script in mind? Dark alleys, fog-festooned graveyards, dingy dripping grottoes—these were the standard locales for violent encounters, gothic sites that mirrored the gloomy minds of those who haunted them. Not a pretty wallpapered room with silver cutlery clinking against china plates and smiling servers ticking off the daily specials. What was more, having already guessed what he was likely to propose, or at least some semblance of it given what he asked for last time, and figured what my counterproposal might be, I slept well that night, no bad dreams, and woke up more refreshed than I had been in months.

Typical of his methods, he hadn't provided me with instructions how I might go about agreeing to the meeting, which he had called for the next afternoon. I took it upon myself to leave a note for him at the front desk of the hotel, stating that I would be there at three as proposed. It was a late hour for lunch, but I assumed he wanted to get together at a time when the dining room would be more or less vacant, a quiet public place to have a quiet private talk. Although there was no Henry Slader registered at the hotel, I described him to the manager who said, “Oh, yes, Mr. Henry Doyle, I believe you mean,” to which I smiled a little and handed him the envelope, saying, “That's him. Could you make sure he gets this?” I walked across the street and down the few doors to Eccles's shop, convinced that Slader-Doyle's eyes were on my back. Fortunately, I didn't give in to my sarcastic juvenile temptation to turn around and wave at the upper windows of the hotel. My self-conscious gait, its strides too long and confident for the short distance, and the unhappy butterflies fluttering in my gut, must have been a sight. I couldn't open and shut the front door of the shop quickly enough.

Work was slow. Tourist season was over as the cold had really begun to settle over Kenmare. The hours dragged. Eccles had no jobs for me on the press, so I did some inventorying, moved our selection of Christmas cards to the front racks, and helped with getting holiday decorations arranged in the shop windows, the usual pine boughs and strings of white electric lights. This was the time, I was told, when we mostly sold stocking stuffers, diaries for people to write their most secret thoughts in, funny pencils and leprechaun gag erasers, yes, not to mention decorative paper and ribbons of all colors to wrap them in. I kept glancing out the window into the street involuntarily, thinking I might see Slader there, but as the daylight faded early—we were nearing the first day of winter—faces became obscured, even though the windows of shops, pubs, and other businesses up and down the street were cheerfully aglow.

Off and on throughout the afternoon and into the drear evening—Meghan was feeling a little under the weather, so I made us a simple dinner of broth and an omelette—I found myself going over the events that had shaped and reshaped my life these past years. At the forefront of my mind was Henry Slader. In particular I found myself wondering why he had developed an animus toward me that truly felt like visceral hatred. Of course, we had tangled, albeit unintentionally to some degree, on crossed business matters. Two forgers interested in the same authors, furtively competing in the same small market, and forced by specialization to share some of the same contacts, were never destined to become fast friends. Be that as it may, I found it inexplicable why Slader would spend such time and effort, not to mention money—
The Winding Stair
was not a cheap book; flights to Ireland weren't free—in an attempt to frighten me, bully me, threaten me. The punishment did not seem to fit the crime.

While absentmindedly clearing the table, Meghan having gone to the living room to read and rest, I found myself wondering whether there wasn't even more to Henry Slader's connection with Adam than I had previously imagined. Had Adam been a source of far more money for Slader than I'd imagined, the police would have had reason to question him twice, would they not? That might at least begin to explain his current behavior. And if the invoice I discovered in Montauk was only the tip of the proverbial, now melting iceberg, then he would be right to believe—since he seemed convinced I had killed Adam—that I had stolen more from him than just the Baskerville forgery. Small comfort that I was reminded of the nineteenth-century debates in British Parliament about whether forgery itself could be defined as theft and therefore the appropriateness, or not, of the death penalty as punishment. Today I found myself siding with Charles Bowdler, who argued in 1818 that “men may as well employ themselves in pelting the sun with snow-balls, as in raising arguments to defend the taking of life for the offence of Forgery.” I had to wonder where Slader, who, unlike me, had probably never read Bowdler's treatise
On the Punishment of Death, in the Case of Forgery
, would stand on the matter. If he considered me not just a murderer but, in some ways worse by his lights, a thief, a larcenist unwittingly bent on putting him the poorhouse, what then?

I lied to Meghan that night, which I believed was sometimes a justifiable and even necessary sin. She had found a modicum of peace in her life after her brother's death. Withholding certain things that would hurt her or cause her undue worry was not only fair but wise. With this in mind I mentioned to her that Eccles wanted me to meet with some people tomorrow afternoon around three to discuss the possibility of our combining efforts to start a small press.

“Really? That's wonderful,” she said.

“Well, very preliminary and it might not happen,” I invented, immediately wanting to backpedal.

“What sorts of things would you publish?”

“Just chapbooks, I think, limited editions on nice laid stock and stitch-sewn into heavy paper bindings. Local authors, mostly poets I guess, who would underwrite the books. I don't know. It's all just come up.”

I wasn't thinking clearly. Why invent such a complicated ruse to buy myself an hour or two with Slader? When Meghan exclaimed, “What a wonderful idea,” my heart, already leaden, sank further.

“Well, mind you,” I said, voice lowered as if by doing so lessened the reality of the project I had fashioned out of pure fantasy, “this could be totally pie in the sky.”

“Either way, I like it. Can't wait to hear how the meeting goes.”

“I'll let you know,” I said, relieved she went up to bed soon after.

The word
seek-sorrow
returned to me, like an acidic reflux in my throat, as I finished washing and drying the dishes. At least, I assumed, while I slowly climbed the stairs to join Meghan in bed, as tardy and tentative as some geriatric, that Slader and his hound would not be up to their miserable dramatics tonight. My path back out of that small deception was easy enough to forge. The meeting went poorly, alas. The project was stillborn.

Just after sunrise, a lissome creamy fog reclining in the treetops of the forest out the window, I dressed and went to work on the early side to avoid further discussing and thereby perpetuation of my preposterous lie. Still not feeling well, although she was long past her days of morning sickness, Meghan decided to spend the day home in bed. Having never before been absent from work at the bookshop, she figured this once the proprietor could manage without her. Naturally, wanting her as far from Kenmare village as possible, I concurred, palming her forehead and commenting she was a little warm and clammy which, as it happened, she was. Irish weather finally caught up to you, I suggested.

“Good luck with your meeting,” were her last words after I kissed her goodbye, having brought her soda bread, butter and jam, and a pot of cinnamon spice tea on a tray.

After marking my anxious time at the stationer's—I distractedly undercharged one woman then overcharged the next—I told my boss I needed to leave early to meet a good friend from America for a late lunch, yet another lie, and left for the day, walking across the street to the hotel restaurant. Slader wasn't there even though it was a little after three and, so far as I knew, all he had to do was waltz down the stairs from his room. I ordered a pint. But as the girl left to get my drink, I changed my mind, and asked her instead for a double Connemara neat.

He made me wait a very long half an hour while I began to worry that he had taken it upon himself, while situating me here for our supposed meeting, to go out to the cottage and present his case against me to Meghan. As my second double arrived—irony is its own god—so did he.

“Sorry I'm late,” Slader said.

How can I describe my feelings as I sat there, watching him order a Jameson, for the first time looking closely, minutely even, at this man who had caused me so much grief and trouble, and to whom I myself had been, it seemed undeniably, such a scourge?

“So, here we are,” he interrupted my thought, or displaced it.

“Here we are.”

Looking across the table, I couldn't help but admire how civilized the man was with his prominent cheekbones, his dark eyes serious as a scholar's, his black wide wale corduroy jacket tailored but comfortable, his graceful hands and fingers markedly veined and white as gypsum. He was both more elegant and physically sturdier, more robust I suppose one could say, than I remembered him during our cat-and-mouse Armory encounter and the brief meeting we had afterward. What struck me most, and it was such a quicksilver thought that raced across my consciousness it hardly seemed real, was that I saw in Henry Slader, this visible, visceral Slader, someone who in an ideal world I ought to have been able to talk to honestly about what we most loved. If there was anyone alive with whom I could have an in-depth, sophisticated dialogue about forgery it would be this fellow artist seated but a few feet away from me. Absurd, momentary lunacy, I knew, rebuking myself as I lifted my glass in a toast, saying, “
Sláinte
.”