The Forgers (3 page)

No need to relate every turn of the screw as our evening spiraled downward from there. Suffice it to say the poor woman turned on me for a few really rotten days and nights, threatened never to see me again. She was, and I state this with a curious sort of admiration, harder on me than the police had been.

“How could you not have known about Adam? There's no way you couldn't have known,” she said, her voice tight, her face half as red as her hair.

“Suspecting and knowing are two very different animals,” I countered.

“Do you understand how humiliating this is? What if it gets around everywhere?” she asked. “My customers will laugh behind my back, or worse, they'll feel sorry for me. I could lose my business.”

“But you, you haven't done anything wrong. Nobody's accusing you of anything. And nobody but you is accusing me of anything, either.”

“Between you and now Adam, why should anybody trust me any more? Why should I even trust mysel
f
?”

Knowing I might better keep my mouth shut, but in a fit of exasperation, I said, “Speaking of trust. When they questioned you, did you tell them you thought I didn't like your brother? Is that why they dragged me back in today?”

“I never said anything of the kind.”

“Because I couldn't help but wonder, while I was sitting in their airless room going around in circles with them, if that wasn't why I was there.”

It went on like that, my feeble attempt at accusation having fallen flat. She suspected me of having been a pernicious influence on Adam, even of having worked secretly with him, all kinds of crazy things. I'd never seen her act like this before and was at a loss what to do beyond telling her she was wrong.

Eventually the hostility, or anger, or shame, or the thorny combination of all of those and more passed. Meghan and I had weathered tough times in the past and we were going to get through this one, too. What she didn't know, could never know, was that even if I had bothered to work with her brother, my influence on him would have been
beneficial rather than pernicious—at least to his craft—but that I would never in a hundred millennia have shared my techniques, my supply sources, my tools, my
passion
with Adam Diehl or anybody else. It is possible that although she couldn't fathom why I so adamantly denied having anything to do with Adam's forgery, the adamancy itself and the indisputable truth of my denial finally got through to her.

When we made up, strolling through Tompkins Square for coffee while she was on a lunch break, I told her, “Look, Meg, after what you've been through, it's a wonder you've held yourself together as well as you have.”

A cynic might see these words as clichéd, but they were offered in good faith. And sometimes, in the right circumstances, even the simplest cliché can carry profound weight. If, as Emerson wrote, every word was once an idea, every cliché was once a revelation.

D
ESPITE MY EFFORTS TO THE CONTRARY
and even as Meghan and I grew closer after our brief argument, Adam haunted my thoughts. Whether I was helping her in the bookshop or doing authentication and cataloguing at the auction house where I'd settled into as close to a permanent position as I ever would have, he was a ghostly presence. I would always be grateful for his bringing along his sister, some half-dozen years back, to the book fair where I first met her—a gratitude I never bothered expressing because I knew without asking how our early flirtations and eventual relationship chafed at him—but there wasn't much else about the fellow that drew anything from me akin to warm amicability.

I don't remember for sure the first time I laid eyes on him, though I recognized the man in a nebulous across-the-room sort of way some years before I even knew he had a sister and well before my forger's days came to a dismal end. Adam Diehl was one of those people who slowly dawned on you. Who you realize, without giving it conscious thought, is someone you have seen before but didn't know. His maker had given him a nondescript face, which probably aided him in his line of work. To say his skin was sallow might be a little mean-spirited, but that he could live beside the sea and maintain such a candle-wax complexion spoke volumes as to how little time he spent outdoors. He was thinner and taller than most, loose-jointed, one might say even willowy. He shared with Meghan, as I'd later find out when he introduced us, a head of wavy red hair and eyes the color of Noodler's Baystate blue ink, emblems of their Irish heritage—indeed, Meghan had been born in the land of Yeats, Joyce, and Beckett, and had dual citizenship though she hadn't visited the old country since childhood. His dress was studiously decades out of style, an eccentricity I admit I found kind of endearing. His inveterate blue-black blazer with its gold-trimmed crest-of-arms pocket patch, his white shirt and narrow black tie, even his gabardine trousers hung on his frame as if upon a secondhand-shop mannequin. Not unhandsome, he stood out from the crowd largely because of his height, hair, and tortoiseshell bifocals. Also, he had the thinnest wrists I had ever seen on a man and the most elegant, tapered fingers.

Overall, an eccentric, an odd duck. But then antiquarian book fairs are, to mix a metaphor, beehives of odd ducks, and this dawning of Diehl occurred at rare book shows over the years, such as the annual international gathering of dealers at the Armory on Park Avenue. Once his presence did take hold, I noticed that he and I frequented many of the same specialists' booths.

There is a bookseller out there for every bibliophilic obsession known to humankind. You want a seventeenth-century book on microscopy with engraved illustrations on the life cycle of mosquitoes? There is a dealer who can provide you with that. You fancy rare volumes on Antarctic exploration or the history of ancient Egyptians? Not a problem. Perhaps a first edition, first printing of Jonathan Swift's
Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World
,
by Lemuel Gulliver
or the 1813 triple-decker of Jane Austen's
Pride and Prejudice
in contemporary cal
f
? These can be had. With money, patience, and an obsessive hawk eye, there are few books in the world that cannot be taken home to place on a shelf or in a safe. Librarians and collectors, from high rollers to those of more modest means, converged with calendric regularity at the big Armory show and other such fairs around the world. And many of these bibliophiles became business acquaintances if not friends over time.

Slowly, vaguely, I began to notice that Diehl and I were mostly interested in the same literary autograph materials, such as inscribed books and original holograph manuscripts from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I would like to think I wasn't stalking him, but after walking into this or that bookseller's booth and hearing more than once that another gentleman had just shown interest in the same item, studying it with great care, I found it impossible not to take heed. Who was this guy with shared tastes and a penchant for admiring at length the penmanship of Churchill and Conan Doyle?

“You mind my asking what else he looked at?” was a question I found myself posing with increased frequency and not a little hesitation. Some sellers, the more seasoned ones, shrugged off my cheeky question with slight not-unfriendly smiles that read, You know I can't do that. But others, whether from carelessness or simply an eagerness to flaunt their wares, showed me this Thomas Hardy letter or that Wilkie Collins inscription that Diehl had held in his hands not long before. The more I learned about his tastes, the more I was intrigued by him even as a small wary voice in my head advised me to be careful.

Now and again I did buy a manuscript, a letter, an inscribed first edition. Not only didn't I want to be perceived as a stiff—even the most lackadaisical merchant is there to sell, not simply show—but I liked to take home some of the best examples I found by my favorite authors in order to analyze their every nuance under a gooseneck magnifying glass in the solitude of my study. I knew I could always auction them off later or make a private sale, at cost or even a modest loss, and still come out ahead of the game thanks to knowledge gained. Unless run to ground, forgers always come out ahead. Nature of the beast. Although, as in any vocation, those who truly love their work would embrace it with every fiber of their being even if there were nothing but a plug nickel at the rainbow's end. For me, the pot of gold was in the act itself, even if the act produced but fool's gold.

On a Saturday afternoon in April some half-dozen years ago, standing elbow to elbow in the booth of a gregarious London dealer with leonine unkempt hair and disheveled tweed suit, Diehl and I were finally introduced. I had just handed back an inscribed first edition of Darwin's
On the
Origin of Species,
having spent a good deal of time studying the inscription, its date and place, its recipient, and above all the calligraphy and signature, when Diehl materialized like an apparition at my side, softly coughed, and asked the dealer if he might have a look at it too before it went back into the glass display case between Freud's
Die Traumdeutung
and a signed copy of Ludwig Wittgenstein's
Tractatus
, each in astonishingly fine condition.

“I'm sure you two must know each other?” said the genial dealer.

Diehl and I turned and looked at one another.

“I don't, I'm afraid,” he said, although I sensed his eyes betrayed a subtle recognition of me. The unmodulated tone of his voice, flat as a folio's flyleaf, was unreadable. I had always been far better at interpreting inanimate manuscripts than living voices and the looks on people's faces.

“Don't think so,” I said, not quite lying but not exactly telling the truth—a tit-for-tat.

We shook hands and I offered a platitude about the Darwin, something about how it amazed me that such a rare book could at the same time be so common. There were at least several available at the fair.

“Money is always a nice incentive,” the dealer said, joining in with his own platitude.

“Too rich for my blood,” offered Diehl, as he handed the volume back and, after saying it was nice to meet me, left.

“Collector?” I enquired, feigning naivete, having noticed that this Diehl fellow was rarely if ever to be seen
carrying purchases, mummified in clear plastic bags, under
his arm.

“More a scout. He's sold me some good things over the years, though he surprises me now and again by buying the occasional gem. Not unlike yourself.”

“Oh,” I said, and turned my head to glance at him as he disappeared down the aisle crowded with fairgoers.

Of course, neither Diehl nor I were ever, strictly speaking, scouts, other than to scout out nice copies of unsigned firsts that could after a “cooling period” re-enter the market duly autographed or fulsomely inscribed by their respective authors—or else pick up inexpensive, relatively unimportant period books and manuscripts with blank leaves that, extracted, could become canvases for newly created period manuscripts or letters. After that initial encounter, I began to suspect who and what he really was and, as discreetly as I could manage, asked those in my closest coterie of dealers where they happened to acquire this inscribed volume or that autograph letter. It seemed to me that more Conan Doyle documents were surfacing than usual, and because Sherlock Holmes had always been my favorite, my meat and potatoes, my black clay pipe and deerstalker hat if you will, I was keenly attuned to such minutiae. Fair or not, logical or not, I became convinced that Diehl was the primary source for this rising tide of inscribed and holograph Holmes materials. As I started looking into the matter I recalled the sleuth's housekeeper, Mrs. Hudson, in the Sherlock Holmes movie
The Spider Woman
, who at one point proclaims, “What can't be cured must be endured.” For better or worse, I have seen all the celluloid Sherlocks, from Basil Rathbone to Jeremy Brett, and while I far prefer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's tales to anything caught on film, that line stuck to me like a newly noticed birthmark. And much as I might hate a birthmark, I hated this sentiment. Not only are there myriad ways to avoid enduring the incurable but, other than a malignant tumor or some other terminal illness, I believe there is nothing that cannot be cured. You see, I am fundamentally an optimist.

I began by questioning the authenticity of what were, to my honed eye, possible fakes. In my own work, any time I made even the most insignificant mistake when forging an inscription, I bit the bullet and either discarded the volume in disgust or single-edge-razored out the flawed leaf and then sold the amputated book to a secondhand shop for a fraction of the money I had originally paid. I never allowed anything out of my windowless, well-lit workshop that wasn't first-tier quality. Others were less scrupulous. So whenever I discovered a small anomaly, I respectfully and privately brought it to the attention of whatever dealer had it in stock. I was cautious not to make a nuisance of myself and didn't bother alerting anyone to signatures that were conspicuously bogus—let somebody else point out that William Burroughs, not my era but just for instance, rarely dotted the “i”s in his first name—but near misses, professional work with a telltale Achilles' heel, were fair game.

Just before Memorial Day that same spring, knowing of my lifelong interest in all things Sherlockian, my favorite bookseller, Atticus Moore, up in Providence, gave me a ring and told me he had acquired a large group of remarkable letters written by Conan Doyle in May and June 1901 to Greenhough Smith, editor of the
Strand Magazine
. Seventeen letters in all, they detailed at length progress being made on the manuscript of what would become
The Hound of the Baskervilles
, which the
Strand
published later that same year. Though they appeared never to have been mailed for some reason and were apparently unpublished, all the biographical points checked out, according to my friend. Written from Devon, they described in fresh detail precisely how Doyle had gotten the original idea from a journalist acquaintance, Bertram Fletcher Robinson, while vacationing at the Royal Links Hotel on a headland overlooking the North Sea in Norfolk. A draft passage set in Grimpen Mire, based on the real-life bog, Fox Tor Mire, that never made it into the published manuscript was penned on the verso of one letter and then crossed out. In another letter, Conan Doyle describes having privately witnessed a midnight apparition out his mullioned window after having visited Park Hall, the ancient Robinson manor house on which Baskerville Hall probably was based, an apparition he dared not mention to his companions as it too closely resembled the monstrous, mythological hound of his story-in-progress—a monster “best confined to the precincts of memory.” The letter concluded he would retain “an inquisitorial attitude” about the vision, although he fails to mention it further in the subsequent epistles.