The Forgers (5 page)

So it distressed me that whoever penned this letter—not in the strictest sense a forgery since it wasn't meant to dupe me into believing it was actually scribed by James himself—knew what I was about and threatened to turn my life upside down. I was not going to allow that to happen. What was more, as I sat and studied the document with a magnifying glass, its subtle flaws began to surface out of the murk of concern it provoked, like an ugly tentacled fish rising to the surface of some brown, stagnant pond. Whoever managed this was quite good, in many ways even great—I admired the James signature, which would pass muster with the pickiest of autograph experts, not to mention the facsimile letterhead that was a dead ringer for an original. But there were upwards of half a dozen small graphic mistakes aside from the fact the author of this nasty little note made no attempt whatsoever to reproduce James's magisterial voice. The arcade formations of the lowercase “m” looked like nearby molehills rather than the jagged distant mountain peaks of Henry James's characteristic ems. Word spacing was, I felt, somewhat tighter than it should be, and the amount of ink flowing from nib to paper was far too consistent. Such flaws in craft meant flaws in character, to my mind. It suggested, wrongly as it would turn out, that my invisible defamer might not be quite as terrifying a threat as he portrayed himself.

Be this as it may, after the first flush of shock wore off, my feelings graduated to something I wasn't at all used to. I became angry. Very angry. And anger is not a sensation I like. The letter was postmarked in New York, with the same ZIP code as my apartment, another upsetting taunt. In the absence of a return address where I might respond, there was little—no, there was exactly nothing I could do. To make matters worse, this was only the first in a series of inexplicable and maddening letters that I would receive over the course of the next months. I could not afford to report them to the police or anyone else, for the obvious reason that if I did, my beautiful house of counterfeit cards threatened to come crashing down, and the vocation that gave me such joy might be destroyed forever.

Was it coincidental the letters began arriving not so very long after Meghan and I got serious about our relationship, declared ourselves a couple? Maybe so, maybe not, but if I suspected Adam, the way he acted toward me—polite if awkward, restrained yet sometimes willing to share anecdotes about rare book acquisitions or the gossip that circulates through the arteries and veins of the antiquarian trade like lifeblood—gave me pause, a pause I wished into being for Meghan's sake.

Instinctually, I knew Adam regretted our introduction at the Armory show when she tagged along with him and we were crowded together in a booth, making it hard for him not to offer the gesture without appearing thoroughly rude. She and I spoke with easy camaraderie from our first warm handshake. Seeing as Meghan lived downtown, not all that far from me, we decided to go out for a drink, talk books. She showed interest in my collection, and I wanted to visit her shop. Ours was an instant attraction. Love at first sight, if such a thing existed. Despite the unvarnished chill that emanated from her wary brother in even those initial minutes of my acquaintance with his sister—he stood there like the proverbial third wheel, a flat tire of a man—Meghan and I felt we had known each other our entire lives, an impression we confessed on that first drink date several days later. As we grew closer over the weeks and months, Adam and I, never close, withdrew into a polite remoteness. Sure, I recognized that I cut into the time his sister might otherwise have spent with him, in person or on the phone—he seemed far more needy and attached than she, to such an extent that I began to find it pathological—but what could I do? For my part, I think I tried to reach out, at least enough for appearance's sake. But the one time we set up a date to finally have lunch together—I agreed to do this for Meghan's sake, and given I never once traveled out to the tip of Long Island to visit his place, a Manhattan lunch was the least I could do—he himself canceled at the last minute because of some plumbing emergency that had come up in Montauk. He had to get straight out there to attend to it, some Niagara of a dripping faucet, and we never rescheduled.

As for these noxious letters, though, I had to question what possible motive he would have to threaten his sister's beau, his sister whom he clearly adored and whose happiness was paramount to him. Even if he and I were never warm toward one another, would he have been incensed enough to give in to such impulses?

Looking back, I should probably have saved them, these missives. But what good would it have done? They served to incriminate only me, not the sender. If I hadn't been guilty of pretty much every last thing they accused me of doing, I might have had some recourse. But stew as I might in my personal toxic juices of rage and dread, there was no clear response, so I systematically tore them up and threw them away, flushing them in bits and pieces down the toilet. A frustrating business, as vintage bond, unlike toilet paper, prefers to remain afloat rather than sink. Much like guilt itself, I suppose.

In the midst of this concern, I focused on Meghan and my then-current Conan Doyle projects, including nice inscriptions I'd made in a cache of early books bought in England years ago that were ready to re-engage the world with fresh histories. These afforded me the happiness necessary to get through days spent both figuratively and literally looking over my shoulder. Meg and I loved going out to inexpensive restaurants she'd read about, testing various cuisines, sampling the vast variety of foodie culture that only New York and its boroughs can offer—Russian in Brighton Beach, Jamaican in Canarsie, Polish in Greenpoint, Bengali in Kensington. She ran her bookshop by day, which gave me plenty of time to go about my own literary labors in a basement room I rented pseudonymously, not far from my apartment, paying the landlord in cash every month with a dull regularity meant never to raise an eyebrow.

For all my vague suspicions about Diehl during the couple of years I knew him before those ominous letters began arriving, it wasn't until Meghan invited us both over to celebrate her thirty-fifth birthday that an awkward truth surfaced. As it happens, Yeats was Meghan's favorite poet, and though she'd been born in Ireland she had never visited it as an adult. Her lifetime dream was to see Yeats's grave in Drumcliff one day, row out to the lake isle of Innisfree, climb up to the foot of Ben Bulben, sample beer-battered codfish and chips with a pint of Guinness in Sligo. While I couldn't quite pull off giving her that for her birthday, I did get in touch with a Dublin dealer to purchase a signed limited edition of
A Vision,
privately printed by T. Werner Laurie in 1925. I thought it would make a perfect placeholder of sorts until a trip to Ireland was more feasible. Following a homey dinner of turkey and trimmings, leftovers from Thanksgiving, I handed my girlfriend a flute of champagne I'd just uncorked and gave her my gift.

“Oh, I love this,” she exclaimed with an excited hug and kiss, after sipping the bubbly and opening the package. “It's my favorite prose book by Yeats, although I can't claim to completely understand it. His gyres always made me dizzy, but now I'll have to give them another go.”

When her brother muttered something about great minds thinking alike as he offered her his present, we all knew what it was. Not
A Vision
, his birthday present was a pretty copy in dust jacket of an early trade edition of the
Collected Poems
, autographed by the poet on the title page.

“Now all you're missing are the plays,” he said.

“Don't forget the autobiography, the letters, and essays. Yeats contains multitudes,” was her beaming response. “This is amazing. You guys must have worked it out together.”

We assured her that we were as surprised as she.

“Well, what a wonderful coincidence. Thank you both so much,” she said. “Absolute best birthday presents ever.”

After Adam left, Meghan insisted, not for the first time, that her brother and I ought to be better friends. “Do you need more proof than the gifts you just gave me? You think alike, you're both bibliomaniacs, both a little reclusive, and both a bit nuts, just like me,” she said, as we washed and dried dishes.

When she retired to the bathroom to get ready for bed, I furtively took a look at the autograph in Adam's gift. I don't suppose I should have been irked to see that it was a somewhat admirably executed forgery, or so it seemed in the candlelight, but it galled me nonetheless. I, who could have done a better job of it, had gone out and tracked down an authentic signed Yeats, while this was all her vaunted brother could manage? Naturally, I had no intention of telling her. My soul may at times be dirty, but it's not diabolical. She was happy and that made me happy. But that night solidified my feelings toward Adam. My purpose henceforth was to be outwardly nice toward him whenever he and I were thrown together, but otherwise stay as far away from the man as I could. He set my teeth on edge, let me admit it, and I didn't like feeling that way. Meantime, Henry James's letters to me persisted, sporadic and damning.

“You all right?” Meghan asked, startling me from my unpleasant reverie.

“Oh, I'm sorry,” snapping to as the luncheon was breaking up. “Thinking about Adam is all.”

She smiled, sadly. “What were you thinking?”

“About that time when we both gave you those signed Yeats books.”

As I helped her on with her coat before heading out to the car, she said, with aching wistfulness, “Those are my two favorite possessions in the world.”

Outside, the clouds had let forth with fine ice pellets
that stung our faces like arctic nettles, making me marvel what a crummy world it is we sometimes inhabit.

M
Y DOWNFALL CAME
on an otherwise classically beautiful autumn day. I was in my apartment making coffee after sleeping in. Meghan and I had been out the night before on one of our subway excursions to an outer borough neighborhood for some lamb curry she'd read was the best in the city, and I had gotten home late after dropping her off at her place. The knocks at my door came in three insistent bursts, like nothing any of my neighbors would ever make. I hitched my bathrobe tight, finger-combed my hair, and walked to answer, my stomach churning. The letters promised this moment, and I sensed it was now upon me. Two men stood there, one of medium height and artificially tanned, the other stocky and short with pockmarks on his cheeks, each displaying a badge and looking past me into the room. I had seen such things in movies but it was surreal, to say the least, for it to transpire before my very eyes, and not in some darkened theater but my own home.

There is no need to describe in detail what happened next, given it was all more or less as one might expect. A typical investigation had gone on for several months, one in which I was drawn into selling a couple of overpriced forgeries to a couple of second-tier dealers I would never speak to again, nor they to me. One of the books was a relatively inconsequential Robert Frost, but the other, a signed copy of
Dubliners
dated 1914, the year of publication—my rendering of James Joyce's signature running upward from left to right as was his sometime habit—was a different story. Big money, that one, well into five figures. Some overpriced, overrated autograph experts were brought in to verify what the police wanted to hear, and thus was I stung.

The only freakish part about the arrest was that the officers, who came in and sat with me to talk a little before making their collar, provided me with a copy of a confession to my crimes written out in
my own hand
—yes, I do have my own personal handwriting, and much as we are let down when an impersonator speaks in his regular voice, my penmanship left a few things to be desired. They didn't seem to like it when, seeing words I hadn't written right there in my own hand, I let out with a loud, thunderstruck laugh. Of course, I thought. Whoever had been sending me the menacing letters in James's hand could not resist a pièce de résistance, an inside joke only he and I would truly appreciate. Even as I spent the night downtown sitting on the hard concrete bench of a holding cell with twenty other miscreants until being released on my own recognizance the next morning, I vacillated between hating the bastard who did this to me and admiring his sense of humor. The counterfeit of my handwriting wasn't perfect, which led me to infer that my accuser worked up his facsimile from fragments he hadn't spent much time studying or else wasn't all that accomplished. Still, the resemblance was close enough that it would have taken someone with my skill to recognize it as a forgery, and on this neither the police nor courts would ever accept my considered testimony—if it ever came to that, which it didn't.

Too, I began racking my brain, going through the many hundreds of deals I had been involved in over the years, trying to figure out who was behind my sudden shift of fortune. I should add that Adam Diehl, right or wrong, was on my short list. He for one would have had access to my handwriting if he'd secretly read my letters to Meghan, of which there were quite a number, as we shamelessly adored penning each other private love notes, especially in our earliest months of dating. Stealing glances at our romantic exchanges wouldn't have been hard for Adam to do, since whenever he visited town he stayed at her place while she moved over to mine. On the other hand, because I was an avowed Luddite who stubbornly refused to deal with computers, any number of other letters, not to mention invoices and checks, were out there in the bibliophilic universe for someone to study and mimic.

Now let me say in no uncertain terms that a night in jail, especially in the jail known as the Tombs in lower Manhattan, is one night too many. Not knowing whether I faced more than just that one, I resolved to do everything within my now somewhat constrained powers to make things right, to pay the myriad pipers and try to resuscitate my life. Meghan was crucial in this process.