The Forgers (4 page)

It was as unique and historically interesting a clutch of letters as my dealer friend had ever handled. Given the letters were written by my favorite writer from childhood to this day, a writer of exquisite, enviable cunning and a craftsman of the first order, I knew immediately that they had to be mine no matter the cost. He asked if I would like to run up to Providence to see them and have a late lunch afterward.

I would and did, grabbing the first train north the very next morning. As I watched the inlets along the Connecticut coast pass by, the sailing boats and osprey nests on their stilts, my mind itself traveled in different directions. Part of me urgently hoped this unposted correspondence was genuine, as I would dearly love to add it to my small “permanent” collection—I incarcerate the word
permanent
within quotes because I think it is one of the most fraudulent words in the English language, and signifies an incontestable falsehood. Another part, however, suspected the letters and that unpublished manuscript fragment were simply too good to be true—much like the idea of permanence—even though my friend was one of the most respected authorities in the world.

After looking them over for an hour and haggling out a fair purchase price, by which I mean hefty but not eviscerating, we had an excellent downtown meal at Capriccio, his treat, and I was back in New York that same evening with my newly acquired trove. To say I was excited would be misleading in that these essentially worthless pieces of paper for which I had paid a good deal of not-worthless money were not destined for the permanent collection. No, the whole lot was a fraud. But it was far and away the finest forgery I had seen in many a year, perhaps ever, inventive in its content, convincing in its execution. I was awestruck and disturbed and compelled to take it off the market lest it come under wider scrutiny.

A forgery of this high quality is, to my mind, as informed by genius as any of your everyday authentic originals. It's just that the creativity involved is of an altogether different variety. A page upon which the creator of Sherlock Holmes has written a passage, one in which let's say a diabolical murder has taken place, one that's stumped Scotland Yard, one that requires Holmes's powers of deduction to solve, is at the end of the day a literary artifact, nothing more or less. Its significance has everything to do with language, narrative, and imagination, and nothing to do with the author's penmanship. We do not worship gods because they dress well. Many writers from Shakespeare on down have had truly atrocious handwriting. A manuscript by W. B. Yeats is not prized because of his hideous, rushed cursive but instead for the poet's inspired music, his imagery, his vision.

On the other hand, forgery is a visual art form that usually has little to do with such niceties as music, imagery, vision. It has to do with the nuance of calligraphic art, a refined sense of historical materials, the science of empathy. Had I the right rag paper, and minerals to mix a passable Elizabethan ink, I could reproduce a couple of lines of Shakespeare's griffonage from, say,
Titus Andronicus
—

Give sentence on this execrable wretch,

That hath been breeder of these dire events. . . .

—that would, under the right circumstances, separate a foolish collector from his wallet. If one has years of experience, knows what he or she is doing, it isn't all that difficult. The Bard provides the words, the forger his reborn hand. Not, mind you, that I have ever done anything so harebrained as try to pawn off a Shakespeare manuscript. One wants to make money from one's enterprise, not to make the news. Any of the greatest literary forgers in history's hall of fame, forgers so great that collectors today buy their works
as forgeries
for considerable sums—from Thomas Chatterton to William Ireland, George Gordon Byron to Thomas J. Wise—would agree, were they alive and willing to speak the truth.

All of which is simply to underscore why this cache of documents impressed me so. Here was someone audacious enough to invoke both head and hand, not to mention heart. The more I studied the pages, the more my admiration grew. But although I might have loved to meet the progenitor of this surefooted bit of magic, my resolve to outdo what I encountered here bested any impulse to congratulate him on his handiwork. That didn't stop me, however, from making very discreet enquiries of my friend Atticus—yes, his parents were shameless Harper Lee devotees and he always stocked a copy or two of
To Kill a Mockingbird
—as to where he tracked down this luscious trove.

He demurred, as well he might. Dealers who want to stay in business can't go around divulging sources to their buyers, especially a buyer such as myself, one who was deemed by Atticus also to be such a good, productive source. Even, from time to time in the past, a veritable cornucopia. I tucked my question away for a rainy day, one on which he might let down his guard. Nor did I bother him with bald questions about provenance or chain of ownership. Surprisingly few books and manuscripts came with documents of provenance, unlike, say, the art world. Despite my own unusual, dark operation and those of a small handful of others, this was truly a gentlemen's trade, one in which considerable scholarly knowledge and pure commerce made a perfect yin-yang fit.

My next chance came over another meal, this time dinner near our hotel, the Fairmont, in San Francisco, where we were both attending an international book fair. We had each done very well that day—I was at the top of my game about then, with upwards of three dozen writers I could forge with unquestionable mastery—and he was particularly happy about some materials I had sold him before the show.

“It's obscene how you continually find such stunning stuff,” he gushed, referring to a small clutch of Jack London letters about his story “When God Laughs”—outside my preferred area of expertise but perfect for his Bay Area clients at the show, one of whom snapped them up for double what Atticus paid me. “Really,” he continued. “You should have been a dealer yourself.”

“That's what they always told my father,” I replied.

“Yes, but your dad was a thoroughbred collector. Everything I ever heard about him was that he always bought and never sold. Even when he upgraded a copy he kept the duplicate.”

It never failed to make me uneasy when my father—whose memory was still beloved in the trade even by those who never met him—came up. As a collector, he was among the best in his generation. I could only imagine how ashamed he would have been to see his son rightly accused of being a forger, one whose very first attempts at the craft were made while I was still a youth living under his roof, eating his food, studying his library. Though I often missed him, more often I was grateful he had gone the way of all mortals, failing to live long enough to witness the infamy of his own flesh and blood.

After shaking off this flash of disquiet, I set my fork down and said, “Anyway, I don't have the stomach for it. All the rivalry? The competition over customers? The chase after inventory and running down unpaid receivables? I'm better off staying an amateur here on the sidelines, watching you big boys duke it out.”

He thought for a moment. “Don't be silly. You'd be so good at it.”

“I'm not being silly, just sane. Besides, I think I'd be terrible. I'm too lazy to work my caboose off like you do, day in and out, not to mention too asocial. Other than buying books and such, I live within my means and that's good enough for me.”

“You, lazy? I don't think so. Anyway, if you ever change your mind, I'd take you on as a partner in a heartbeat. You just give the word.”

It was flattering, I must admit. Over the years, I had toyed with the idea of going legit—well, not
legit
legit, but going into the business, able to accentuate my stock with a bit of Pygmalion ingenuity, if I so desired—but a wise and cautious voice inside told me I was already plenty public doing what I did. Hanging out a shingle with my name on it only invited scrutiny and therefore trouble. The less known about me, the better.

What my friend didn't know, for instance, was that earlier in the day I had covertly sold to various dealers, each sworn to secrecy and motivated to do so by the promise of future materials, more choice autograph items than any of them could imagine. Bragging rights, to be sure. But bragging wasn't on my menu of possibilities.

“By the way, as your unofficial partner, I'd still like to know where you got all that wonderful Baskerville stuff a while ago.”

“That again. God, you do persist. All right,” he said, taking another drink of his Pinot. “You've actually met the man, tall with red hair and the tortoiseshell glasses?” I nodded. “But don't you dare let on I told you, and if you approach him directly for materials we'll be partners no more, just so you stand warned.”

I promised him I wouldn't, and after dinner picked up the check. We had nightcaps at the hotel bar, mine a double cognac. When he excused himself to head for bed, I indulged in a solo second round, as I figured it wasn't going to be a good night's sleep anyway now that I believed I knew for certain Diehl's secret. Wheeler Diehler, I inwardly smirked, but this bit of sarcasm didn't improve my spirits. If Adam Diehl was a fellow forger with tastes similar to mine, with imaginative projects but imperfect skills, he would, if dealers began doubting his wares and rejecting them as the fakes they were, bring a cumulus of suspicion on others' work,
mine
to be precise.

I
T WOULD BE LIKE CALLING
a gray sky sunny to sug
gest that Meghan's life and mine settled into a routine of contentment that spring after Adam's burial, despite the fact we had never been closer. Instead, our daily lives resembled the ups and downs of a serrated saw blade. No one we knew begrudged us our striving toward normalcy, but neither did we try to pretend the murder hadn't happened. The investigation inched forward, we were told, but no suspect had as yet been identified. Frustrated, Meghan cried every day and suffered almost nightly from bad dreams. And as for me, it was all I could do to be there to console and comfort her, and not lose my own ever-tentative balance. Even when not spoken of, Adam was a presence in his very absence.

His small service, held on a blustery March morning under eel-colored clouds that promised sleet, was attended by a dozen people. Most were Meghan's friends, as well as a few kids who worked for her at the bookshop and had caught a predawn bus from the city to offer their support. That only a couple of rare book folks showed up, neither of whom I knew very well, was testimony to what a hermit he had been. I recognized one of the detectives huddled in a dark blue parka with the rest of us, and spotted another guy I didn't know but assumed was a plainclothes cop or investigator there to scope out the mourners, see if anyone unusual turned up. They say the guilty are oftentimes drawn to the scene after committing a crime, curious perhaps to connect psychologically with their misdeed, or their victim, or maybe even themselves, to make something abstract feel tangible. Adam's burial might well be a draw given that the crime scene was not even a dozen miles away at the Diehl bungalow, which sat shuttered until the investigation was wrapped up and Meghan saw her way clear to opening it again. If the authorities hoped to spot their perp lingering among us mourners, their hope seemed to be in vain, telling by the looks on their faces.

The hired minister repeated what Meghan had told him about Adam's interests and achievements, read a little scripture, sang a cappella with a few mourners joining him on that old warhorse hymn “Amazing Grace.” Meghan clutched the metal funerary urn against her heavy double-breasted overcoat, and wept a little before handing it to the funeral director who would see to its interment, and that was it. We invited the detective to join us at the modest memorial lunch in a local seafood place—the other fellow had disappeared—but he declined. All the while, a lone photographer absurdly snapped some shots of the gathering from a diplomatic distance, hoping perhaps to peddle the images to any tabloids still interested in the story. I would venture to guess his mission was about as futile as the detective's.

At lunch, after a few glasses of wine, while others sang his praises and lamented his untimely death, I found my mind adrift. If Diehl's murder remained an open case, a nasty bit of business from my own past, though nothing as terminal as homicide, remained similarly unresolved. It was nothing I ever liked to dwell on, and when it did surface in my thoughts, like a swarm of riled hornets or ancient Greek furies, I usually swatted it away. Today, however, I couldn't. Why the memory came to me just then was because I always had my suspicions of who was behind what happened but chose not to pursue the matter out of respect for Meghan. Let me explain.

In the mail one day—this would have been half a decade or so before that gloomy memorial luncheon—I received a letter, with no return address, that in retrospect would be the harbinger of my undoing.

You shall be revealed
, it read.
Your deceptions will prove you to be nothing more than a common criminal & not the clever sophisticate you believe yourself to be. Darkness shall one day be upon you.

I don't scare easily. I wasn't afraid of the dark. I thrived in the dark. Nor have I ever been so deluded as to consider myself a clever sophisticate, more a hardworking laborer and devoted artisan than anything else. Part of me wanted to laugh off the whole matter and simply go on with my day without further ado. But what troubled me about this brief note, beside the fact it was penned in Henry James's distinctive flowing hand on what appeared to be authentic Lamb House stationery with its handsome red raised type, was that I had never shared my secret vocation with anyone. Not one lover, not one friend, not one confidant. Not even when I had produced a masterwork that I longed to boast about did I ever betray myself, my secret self. A high thick wall stood between my one true vice, as the world would have seen it, and whatever other misdeeds, transgressions, puny immoralities I might have blurted to anyone, friend, foe, or indifferent.