The Forgers (22 page)

“
Sláinte,
” he echoed.

We looked at each other wordlessly for a few moments before he asked, coolly, “You hungry?” setting his glass back down and glancing at the paper menu that, as it happened, Eccles and I had printed at the shop earlier in the week.

“If you are, yes. If not, not,” I said, watching Slader casually peruse his menu. “But are we really here to eat food?”

“Oh, I don't see why not. Myself, I'm famished. Order something nice, the fish here is excellent—”

“I'm aware.”

“Besides, lunch is on me since you were kind enough to take the time,” he continued, offering up an exquisitely belligerent smile as he waved our waitress, the only other person in the room, over to our table and asked her what was the catch of the day. When she left with two identical orders—I had neither an appetite nor much interest in the touted mackerel or any other fish netted out in Kenmare Bay that day—he picked up just where he had left off. “Although I suppose it's safe to say that you're not here because you really want to be. So maybe ‘nice enough to take the time' isn't exactly right. Doesn't matter. I'm glad you came. It's important we figure a few things out.”

Grateful he wanted to get down to whatever was on his agenda sooner rather than later, I said, “Couldn't agree more. Look, before you tell me what you have in mind, I'd like to say something.”

“We're here to talk. Go for it.”

“For whatever it's worth, and it probably isn't worth much at this point, I'm sorry about that Baskerville business. I shouldn't have copied it. I shouldn't have sold it.”

Slader ran the tip of his index finger around the rim of his whiskey glass, staring me in the eye. “No, you shouldn't have, should you. But it's not that your apology isn't worth much. It's that it's not worth enough.”

“Well, I'll definitely give you the money that Atticus gave me.”

“That is a foregone conclusion.”

We said nothing as the waitress returned to the table with our soups, asked if we wanted another round—we did, but switched to wine—and left.

“Fair enough,” I said.

“Let's get something straight right at the outset. I didn't come to this picturesque little backwater to eat mackerel, drink wine, and be fair. Any chances of my being fair to you are long since gone. They were gone longer ago than you seem to understand.”

“All right,” I said, quietly, as the girl returned with our bottle, opened it, and poured. “What's your idea of not being fair? If I can manage it, I will.”

He waited for her to leave before saying, “Oh, you'll manage.”

Longer ago than I seemed to understand. My musings about Adam Diehl returned, and I flirted with asking Slader in so many words how integrated into his life and business Adam had been. But then I remembered a line Orson Welles said in my favorite of his films, about art forgers, that went something like, “We hanky-panky men have always been with you.” What it meant to me at that moment was that, Adam Diehl's death aside, the very idea of fairness or unfairness was meaningless to the likes of me and Henry Slader, and that our kind has always been around and always will be. Slader and I were merely two iterations of a grand and dirty tradition. We both were forgers as well as forgeries—we pretended to be real men, sophisticated, educated, entrepreneurial gentlemen, men who got away with what we set our minds to get away with. But much as it pained me to admit it to myself, we were only the shadows of men of true substance. I didn't so much feel sorry for the likes of us as I found us vaguely amusing. In my nervousness I'd had too much to drink, granted, but the swirl of ideas made perfect sense to me. Fleetingly, I felt a kinship with this fellow lost soul I recognized as a complex colleague more than a simple adversary.

“Penny for your thoughts,” Slader said, bringing me back to the present reality.

“Real penny or counterfeit?” I asked.

“You're right,” he said, not laughing. “Doesn't matter.”

“Can we stop playing around and get to what it is you want from me?”

“Here's what I want,” lightly tapping out the syllables on the table for emphasis. “As just now agreed, you give me the money Atticus Moore paid you for your bowdlerized copy of the Baskerville work.”

“You mean the perfected copy of your Baskerville work.”

“Let me remind you, you're not in a position of power here. Not if you want your little life with your little wife to go on in its current state of conjugal bliss. Next, I need another half million, as well.”

“Punitive damages?” I smirked.

“No, those come in a minute. The half million's in lost revenues.”

“How have I possibly cost you lost revenues?” I asked, sobering up, seeing that those eyes that had earlier impressed me were now as cold and implacable as those of any natural predator.

“Are you really more dense than the police? Do I have to spell it out to you? When you killed my friend, my partner and protégé, your brother-in-law—”

“He wasn't my brother-in-law and I didn't kill him.”

“—in doing so, you killed my best connections through him. And don't insult us both by denying you killed him.”

“How do you know I killed him? Based on what evidence?” Sensing my right hand quiver, I smoothly moved it from the table to my lap.

“I didn't know, I guessed. Based on what he told me about you. He didn't like you, he feared you. And when you paid me, then I knew.”

“You know absolutely nothing. And if you're so goddamned knowledgeable about all this, Aristotle, why didn't you turn me in?”

Slader leaned forward, his face pulled into a mask of fury as immense as it was contained. “That's a rude and complicated question, but the simple answer is that it wouldn't serve my purposes.” His voice never rose in pitch or volume. He leaned back in his chair, offered a mercurial smile, picked up his spoon, and took a sip of his soup.

I was breathless. As I absorbed his words, it dawned on me that Adam Diehl seemed not to have been a forger at all. Had I ever personally witnessed him making a forgery or discussing the art of forgery? I had not. Did I have hard evidence of his trafficking in forgeries, including that ill-fated Baskerville archive he'd gotten from Slader then sold to Atticus, who in turn sold it to me? Yes, I had. But did I know with absolute certainty that he had done the work himsel
f
? I did not. Those ink pots discovered at the crime scene, were they actually his own—those, as Slader seemed to have intimated, of a novice—or were they used by a visiting Slader come to Montauk to do a little work on some volumes Diehl had acquired? Was that copy of Yeats's
Collected Poems
one of Slader's misfires, a discard forgery that cost Diehl little or nothing to give to his sister, whom he figured would never know the difference one way or the other? Or might it have been Adam's hand after all, but the early scrawl of an unpromising student rather than a sloppy professional? All questions that seemed to have the faint, wretched outlines of answers.

I should have been appalled and maybe terrified, but instead I was awestruck. I would probably never know the truth unless Slader could somehow be maneuvered into confirming or denying that Adam Diehl had died a meaningless death, a wrongful death in the most fruitless of ways. Either way, there was no going back to reattach his hands or unbludgeon his head, bring him back to his rather barren life and hope that, going forward, he might hitch his wagon to a star instead of a black hole.

“Let me get this straight,” I said, regathering my focus and fully aware of my impertinence. “You and Adam Diehl worked together?”

Slader ignored me. “So, half a million. Make it six hundred thousand with interest and to cover collection costs. The Baskerville money. And most important, going forward, seeing as we both have a number of breadwinner years left to live—”

“Unless you and your patsy dog kill me,” I interrupted. “Tell me, where did you find him, Slader? Poor thing chewing on bloody gloves—”

“You're going to start doing what you do best again. I'll provide you with what's needed, and everything will be fine.”

So that was how my debt was to be paid. Adam, who was chronically indebted to Meghan and, it was now becoming clear, Slader—a liability that was the product of his insatiable collecting, with large sums of money going out and little or no money coming in—was forced to earn his way out of the hole as Slader's fence. And now, according to Slader's plan, I was to become, as it were, his hired hand. For a rare instant, I felt a twinge of regret that my life had fledged and taken wing in the particular way it did. Whether by will or habit or the ineffable stamp of personality, this unwonted moment passed as quickly as it had arrived. And good riddance. Regret is for the ruined, the bereft, the fallen, and I was none of those. Yet what expectant parent wouldn't worry over the threat of a stirring beast, unless said beast was safely tucked into the pages of a nursery rhyme book?

The fish arrived. Our waitress asked if we were going to have any more of the soup. We both shook our heads. When she removed the bowls, I really hoped she would eat mine back in the kitchen, so thin she was.

“Sorry, but the answer's no,” I said.

“You're not in a position to say no.”

“I'm sitting here telling you the answer is no. Do you want me to stand and say it? Would that be a better position? Look, Slader, while I might enjoy being your elf, I'm finished with forgery. I swore to Meghan, my wife—”

“I know her name, man.”

“—that I would never do it again, and I won't.”

Slader surprised me when he laughed. Not because he did laugh. That much might be expected, I supposed. But because his laughter conveyed sincere amusement, with no notes of intimidation or sarcasm or ridicule or contempt. Slader simply found what I had said to be comical. He understood, I realized, what Welles did—once a forger, always a forger, always a hanky-panky man.

I saw no need to repeat myself yet again. That sort of line, the emphatic repetition with back of the wrist set against the brow, was for heroines in grocery-store bodice rippers. Would that we were, yet when Slader stopped with his hilarity, his face clouded over with a cool impassivity. I realized it was the face of a man who had passed most of his life by himself, heedless of others because there generally were no others interacting with him, anyway. Unguarded for just a trice, his former polish, his edgy superiority and genteel machismo, fell away to reveal a face that was, for want of a more nuanced way to phrase it, stupid. Worse, mindless. Slader looked like a thug.

“Let's talk about the press at your shop. I understand it's very old. And that your Mr. Eccles has trays and trays of even older type.”

“Leave Eccles alone,” I warned him.

“Who said I had any intention of bothering Mr. Eccles? If I can procure the paper and mix the correct ink, could a late-nineteenth-century document, or earlier, be produced on the thing?”

Meghan's prophetic jab that I never consider printing any broadsides by Poe or Byron, or was it Keats, came to mind.

“The answer is, I'm not sure. The more important answer is, I won't do it. And the most important answer as far as we both should be concerned is, I wouldn't know how to do it well enough for either of us to get away with it for long.”

“That's my problem, the getting away with it part.”

“Listen to me. Atticus has a number of books I consigned to him, amazing stuff from my father's library, which as you know was impeccable. I can simply let you have all the rest of what's left.”

Slader wagged several fingers at me. “Already know all that. Impeccable might be what they were before you ornamented them—I looked them over when I was up in Providence a couple times.”

I started to speak but Slader interrupted, having anticipated me.

“Don't worry, I didn't say anything since I figured they would be paying your way out of the mess you're in with me, anyway. But that'll cover the six hundred or so and I need more, and so will you. So, you see, I come in peace with a peaceful collaboration in mind.”

That sugary characterization of his reasons for wanting to meet with me didn't make me feel a bit more trusting of him. If anything, less so.

“Even if I were willing to get back in the game, I'm too much a novice to be able to guarantee the work would pass muster. Your buyers could be blind as bats, but another one of their senses would betray the work as a fraud—”

Slader opened his mouth to speak, but this time it was I who interrupted him.

“But let me go home and think about it overnight. I acknowledge I owe you money. Owe you even more than that, as you see it.”

“Fair enough, but I have a request. I'm asking you not to bring this up with your wife. We both already know what she'd say, so even broaching the subject would be a waste of time. The less she knows about me, the better for everybody's health.”

Did Slader just threaten Meghan and me? He did, the bastard. Without even having to head back to the cottage to sleep on his absurd proposal, I knew the answer. There was no way I would be able to cooperate with this insufferable maniac. A thought flashed by with meteoric quickness but none of a meteor's burning luminosity—abysmal darkness instead. To wit, it occurred to me that Slader here might want to consider his own health while he was blithely assigning tasks and doling out warnings.

“You have my word,” I said. “I would never want her to know, anyway.”

Slader smiled and drained his wineglass. “Your word, my word. They don't amount to much, do they.”

“In this case, my word amounts to more than you know,” I said, setting down my napkin and rising from the table, given there was little left for us sophists to impart to one another. “Will we meet here in the morning, then?”