The Forgers (24 page)

My thoughts, such as they were, came to an abrupt close when the waitress showed up at the table again, this time holding a pewter tray with an envelope on it. I couldn't help myself, I had to chuckle at the Jamesian nature of the act, its pure Victorian hubris. Slader was going to communicate to me by handwritten letter, delivered on a platter? If he weren't so insane, I thought, he'd be charming.

That was a very bad idea to threaten exposing me, very bad. I might have thought you would know better at this point. I offered you what I considered the fairest of terms and it is now clear without us having to talk further that you reject those terms. Too bad. Pity.

I folded the letter—Conan Doyle's hand, by the way—tucked it into my jacket pocket, and asked the girl, who, paid to do so, hovered nearby waiting for further instructions from me, what I owed for the coffee. After paying her several times over what she quoted, I walked straight to the front desk and asked to speak with Mr. Henry Slader, or rather Henry Doyle, who was a guest here, and was told Mr. Doyle had checked out earlier this morning.

“Did he leave any messages? I was supposed to have breakfast with him.”

“No, sir. None that I see.”

Knowing I was wasting our time, I asked the manager if he possibly had left contact information or an address where he might have gone.

“None, I'm afraid.”

I thanked him, then strode across the street into Eccles's shop, trying to remain cool. As fate would have it—and fate always operated, in my experience, with a most vivid sense of dark humor—that afternoon I ended up printing announcements for a memorial service.

It would have taken very little effort to switch the name of the deceased with my own name. And given the way I felt, it would have made a lot of sense. My worries ran rampant as I went about my repetitive work. I, who thought of myself as being perceptive, even shrewd for the most part, got a harsh comeuppance here. Sure, I had always considered Slader to be suspect at best, a devil with whom one needed the traditional long spoon to sup. But about Atticus, I had deluded myself into considering him not just a friend but one of my closest friends in the trade. Busy forgiving myself any sins I committed against him, I somehow lost track that such sinning works both ways—transgressors are not exempt from being transgressed against. That idea was like a law of spiritual gravity, and yet I had managed to be blind to it all along.

I was in trouble now and knew it. For one last passing moment, I gave some thought to capitulating to Slader. In many ways, that would be the easiest course of action, although finding free time to work the press without either Eccles or Meghan questioning me would be difficult. It was true that some of Mr. Eccles's wooden typecases held fonts that were punched in Irish and English type foundries at least a century ago, perhaps longer, and they would be ideal to use for the time
period Slader had mentioned. And if he was providing the text, the paper, the ink, as well as offering to take the materials to market, my exposure and therefore my legal downside was limited, or so I told myself. The real problem was that I had made my wife a promise and just this once believed I ought to keep it, since what kind of a father would I become if I risked my son's or daughter's chances at a normal life, by which I mean a life in which their father wasn't cooling his heels in prison? Besides, and this was the clincher I had to admit even to myself, my heart was not in it. My onetime love of the visceral act—I would sometimes find myself physically aroused when my hand, my pen, my paper were coordinating so perfectly that a kind of calligraphic, pornographic ballet took place before my eyes—had diminished. And just as feverish love inevitably cools, since otherwise lovers would never survive their own passionate fires, so did my obsession.

As I locked the shop and made my way up the street to where I'd parked our car, I knew it was over. An essential and defining phase in my life was finished, gone, not to be rekindled or resurrected. Oddly, I felt freer than I had in years. Yes, I was worried about consequences, to be sure. But liberated. How I wished I could rush upstairs when I got home and tell Meghan that what she had always hoped for had finally come true. But she wouldn't understand, since she'd believed all along that the poisonous worm that lived in my heart had been extracted and killed for the vermin it was. I didn't want to explain that though it had been largely dormant, the monster still awoke now and then from hibernation and gnawed away at me, and perished at last only this afternoon. Strange that sometimes we must keep secrets that ought to be cried out from the mountaintops.

M
EGHAN JOINED ME FOR DINNER
downstairs in front of the fireplace, where a peat brick softly crackled. I did my best to keep that warm feeling of liberation going, but as with all good things it soon enough faded. What I wanted more than anything was to sleep. My weariness over what had transpired since Slader's unwelcome arrival in Kenmare had taken its toll. Sleep, a nice long dreamless sleep, was the sole cure for my fatigue, I knew. After setting our dirty dishes in the kitchen sink—they could wait until morning to be washed—we climbed up to the bedroom, changed out of our clothes, and slipped under the blankets. Outside the window, a cloud cover must have blanketed the sky, as I saw neither moon nor planets nor stars. I fell into a deep slumber, my body relaxing as I lay on my back like a newborn, arms at my sides, in a matter of a few
tapering minutes.

Next—not even next, abruptly now—I felt a harsh wetness, like broiling fire, as if my right hand by the bed's edge had been thrust into thick scalding water, or else the lively orange lava of that flower-edged volcano I had imagined before. But when was this? How was this happening? Had time collapsed, imploded? I couldn't really answer my questions, barely formulated, because this distracting fire now became icicle cold, or rather
was
at the same time dry-ice blistering frigid. A dream, a nightmare, I thought or supposed, as I gasped awake, choking in air like a drowning man, my eyes blinking in the darkness that seemed to be interrupted by a confined shaft of blue light shining on my body. But a dull crunch and a groan, or harsh guttural growl that came from outside my thoughts, my head, woke me fully and I knew, as my fingers burned again, that I was not dreaming. Two, three more muffled stinging blows to my right hand and I erupted into screams that were almost simultaneously joined by other screams, those of my wife, whose legs were kicking hard beneath the covers as if she were sprinting in place. None of us was speaking in any language.

Instinctive as a trapped beast and with brutal force, I shoved at my assailant—a man was leaning over me, a barbaric grimace on his face faint in the soft sapphire glow of the tiny flashlight clenched in his teeth—but as I did I sensed my right and left hands were different. I must have known what had happened, although I behaved as if my right hand still had all its fingers attached and wasn't mutilated beyond salvation, a stub of meat and bone soaked in blood with which I slugged him, glancing but distracting, before hitting him as hard as I could with my left. Meghan came flying past me in her soon-to-be-bloodied nightgown shouting words, or maybe they weren't actual words but they conveyed her rage and terror, not to mention her courage, because she grabbed the man's forearm before he could bring his—our, yes, our—cleaver down once more.

If I fainted, and Meghan tells me I did, I don't remember much about it. What I do recall before passing out on the floor next to the switch, which I flipped—the grounds around the house were abruptly bathed in light, which shone on the elaborate mess that was our bedroom now—was that I saw the look in Slader's eyes, an ogre caught in the headlights, and understood that not only was he a madman but he had made a terrible mistake. He pushed Meghan aside, dropped the weapon, and, silent as a moth singed by the candle flame, hurried away. The ambulance and local police were at the cottage quickly, Meghan told me the next day when I, not unlike Adam Diehl before me, lay in a hospital bed, although not on death's door or dismembered of my hands. Nor did Slader get very far before the County Kerry authorities took him into custody. Given he was sighted walking into a pub on the outskirts of the village, where he used a public restroom to clean himself up, it would seem that his attack on me had not been all that carefully thought through—although it is true he managed to thwart the security system, to my enduring chagrin and regret, by scaling an old vine slated for pruning along the side of the cottage, cat-burglar style, to a second-story window. Whether it was the blood on his clothes and face or else that wild look in the man's eyes that I myself had seen before I collapsed, the pub owner phoned the authorities at once, and Slader was arrested on the spot.

I did not lose my right hand. Not in its entirety. He managed to cut off my middle three fingers near the knuckle and my pinky at the first joint. Oddly, my thumb remained unharmed. I received excellent care but wonder whether, if we were in Dublin or New York or somewhere with a hospital that had specialists on call who could reattach severed digits, I might have had a hand whose fingers were present and to some degree functional. That wasn't meant to be. Yet as bad as my injuries were, they could have been worse. As Slader would find out later, he hadn't deprived me of the gift of writing. Presumptuous bastard acted on mistaken impulse hoping to end any chances that I might write my name again, or write anyone else's name, by mutilating my right hand. I remembered, while recuperating, a cute mnemonic that one of my grade-school teachers taught us kids way back when we were learning right from left. She said, “If you write with your right, you're left with your left.” Slader might have been instructed with that same little ditty. But since I wrote with my left, my right was wrong, as I believe my clever mother phrased it, or my father. Either way, thanks to Slader I would go forward in life as a bit of a grotesque. I would be one of those occasional people noticed on a subway platform or in a post office, awkwardly clutching the newspaper or an envelope, someone we feel a twinge of sorrow for, an ache of inspiration while witnessing their courage, and great gratitude that we weren't encumbered with a similar disability.

Pollock's fresh interest in questioning Slader about the Adam Diehl case came as no surprise to anyone, least of all me and Meghan. I went out of my way not to implicate Atticus Moore, in part because Atticus had nothing to do with Diehl's death. Naturally, pathetically, Slader, who had fingers to point with, pointed his at me, saying I was the one who slaughtered my wife's brother. I have no doubt that while Pollock might have mistrusted me—he had, after all, also dragged me in for questioning more than once—he viewed Slader's claims as convenient and self-serving, not to mention preposterous and, for any foreseeable future, unprovable. Of course, Slader faced more immediate charges and for those he would go to prison, at least for a while.

Had he succeeded in killing me—though I'm not sure he had wanted to take my life—mine would have been a classic copycat murder. However, this is not what Pollock and many others believed, including Meghan and, over time, myself as well, since I preferred their narrative to the one I knew to be closer to the truth. Slader, in other words, had come after me in the same way he had poor Adam Diehl. One couldn't buy better circumstantial evidence than that, and Slader, for all his entrepreneurial instincts, provided it gratis.

Meghan and I went through a rough patch after the assault, my surgeries and rehab aside. I was finally forced to explain to her who Henry Slader was, no easy needle to thread and a task I needed to be careful about since the authorities were operating, like allergens, at the edges of our lives at that time. I gave Meghan as much as was necessary to satisfy her as well as the guards, as the police were called here, and hoped to let it go at that.

“The main thing you need to understand,” I said, toward the end of one of our less than pleasant discussions on the subject, “is that Slader came after me not because I was doing any forgery but because I refused.” Lying in the hospital bed, having finished eating my paper cup of pineapple sherbert, I readjusted myself so I could look out the window at the bleak winterscape. In no mood to argue, I let out a resigned sigh.

“I hate to say it,” Meghan responded, ignoring the plea inherent in my gestures. “Especially with you here in pain, in the hospital. But there are times I wish I never heard the word ‘forgery.
'
”

“Meg—”

“Forgery,” she spat out the syllables as if they were rancid shreds of gristle. “It's the ugliest word in the language.”

“Maybe what you're really saying is that you wish you'd never met me?”

“That's not what I said, and it's not what I mean.”

I paused before telling her, “If I could go back and undo one thing in my life, it would be to tear out the page in the devil's playbook that stipulated I would be interested in books, autographs, manuscripts, forgery.”

“That's just nonsense. You can have an enormous interest in books and loathe forgery. Most people I know do.”

“You can, they can. I couldn't. But,” holding up my bandaged hand for effect, “I've learned to, the hardest way possible.”

I could read from the look—if looks were books—on her face what she was thinking. No, it was my brother Adam who learned the hardest way possible. Fortunately, she didn't speak but instead reached out and cradled my left hand in both of hers. My wife and I loved each other, I knew, and this was just one more storm we would weather.

“Let's make a pact,” I said. “Let's drop that word from our vocabulary.”

“What word?” she asked with as straight a face as she could manage.

I smiled, and deeply hoped I would be able to hold up my end of the pact.