The Forgers (7 page)

“For some reason I didn't expect them to have left behind any of his books,” Meghan said, walking to the shelves that lined the walls and randomly pulling one down.

“I'm glad they did,” I said, following her. “I guess these weren't useful to the cops so they're all yours now. Everything here is,” I continued, squinting at an Augustus John drawing in a vintage gilt frame over Diehl's desk. It appeared to be quite genuine, not that I knew or even sensed that he might have been into fin de siècle art forgery.

Meghan handed me the book she held, a bright dust-jacketed copy of Carl Sandburg's
The American Songbag
, signed on the front endpaper. “Is it?”

I looked at the copyright page, 1927. “Is it a first edition? Yes.”

“No, no, please. Is it real?”

“The autograph?”

She frowned with obliging impatience as I turned back to the signature, knowing that she knew that I knew what she'd meant. The look on her face was apprehensive, hopeful, serious. I studied it, having decided what my answer would be whether or not the autograph was forged.

To my delight, it sang with authenticity. Sandburg's wide-nibbed fountain pen was evident, as were his Yankee legibility and baseline as level and straight as a schoolmarm's ruler. The garlanded “db” ligature in his surname made it look as if the poet had dropped a whimsical, curlicued “M” smack dab in the middle of “Sandburg.” All of it was, blessedly, and not to mention surprisingly, correct.

“Right as rain,” I assured her.

A random search through the flyleaves and title pages of a number of other books often produced the same happy outcome. The first editions were first editions. The condition was uniformly solid. Most of the authorial inscriptions were right, so far as I could tell on the spot without doing any research, and those that weren't I simply kept to myself. Meghan's pale face was aglow, rosy as a Homeric dawn with relief. Not because she had inherited a valuable collection of literary rarities but because, however unsalvageably ruined as he himself might have been, Adam's reputation was, to her mind, very much rehabilitated. He was not entirely a fraud, and these books on the shelves of the house where he had spent the last years of his life proved it. His bibliographic knowledge seemed estimable, and while his collection was quirky—a more flat-footed collector would have doggedly assembled a wall of standard, canon-approved titles—it showed character. Why he would bother to mix in forgeries of his own making, given they were often subpar, with genuine works was beyond me. Who was he kidding? Not himself and not me.

Strange fellow, I thought, then asked, “While we're at the authentication game, what about that Augustus John drawing? You're the art af
f
icionado here.”

Without even looking at it, she said, “It better be right. My grandfather on my father's side bought it from John's nephew in the old country, and it's been in the family for decades. Isn't it beautiful?”

It was beautiful. A sensual portrait of a Pre-Raphaelite
belle, chin lightly perched on her wrist as her frank gaze met the viewer directly in the eye. Admiring the deftness of the artist's pencil, touched by the story of the drawing's provenance and its being passed down from generation to generation in Meghan's family, I felt a sudden ache of regret, of sadness, of disgust that people such as myself and the late Adam Diehl would deign to falsify objects as exquisite as this drawing. Yet we did. Just as perhaps someone a century or so ago might have faked this very image that Meg and I were now admiring. We did so not merely because we could but because our own passions, skewed according to society's dictates, led us to do it. Our passions may be different from what Augustus John felt toward his female model, with whom he had clearly been in love, but were borne of masterful skill and inspiration nevertheless.

It was a confounding moment, my thoughts reeling as I pictured the violent scene that had occurred in this very room. None of it seemed real. But then the “real” never did much for me, I must admit. I understood
just then that, finally, the greatest difference between Meghan's brother and her lover was—with the curious exception of that Conan Doyle cache I bought from Atticus Moore—just this. Whereas he copied, I created. Whereas he was an artisan, I was an artist. But whereas he was dead without further recourse, I felt myself in a limbo. If I could draw with the mastery of Augustus John but was not Augustus John, why should I deny myself the chance to capture his experience of making this drawing, or one akin, or words possibly even better? I remembered something the greatest art forger of the twentieth century, Elmyr de Hory, once said about his canvases, that if you hang them in a museum with a collection of great paintings, and if they hang there long enough, they become real. He was a true believer.

“Are you all right?” Meghan was asking me.

“Fine, fine,” I said, pulling myself together. “Too much coffee,” and smiled at her, although as long as I live I will never forget the quick vertigo I felt at that moment, posing a question that had no answer for me.

Meghan and I continued to examine books from Adam's library. Most of them were signed or inscribed, a mishmash of famous titles and items more of personal interest, none alphabetized or even arranged by subject. An eccentric's athenaeum. An autographed copy of
Bleak House
was shelved next to a history of Scottish equestrians. Several William Faulkners with signatures that looked wrong to me—Faulkner is the darling of amateur forgers because he looks so easy to fake, although in fact he's extremely hard—I found alongside a treatise by the Russian esotericist and mathematician P. D. Ouspensky, whose signature I neither knew nor cared about. Again and again the question of authenticity arose, sometimes Meghan asking, other times me exclaiming because again and again many of the signatures and inscriptions were, when within my purview of knowledge, authentic. Those that weren't, weren't, not that I felt it necessary, at least at that moment, to divulge the fact to Meghan.

We took a break to eat our lunch on the beach. Sandwiches, chips, white wine in plastic cups. The sky was immaculate, every cloud swept beyond the edges of the horizon, so that we sat on our beach blanket beneath a perfect dome of cerulean. The sea breeze played through Meghan's hair and at that moment I felt I'd never seen her looking so lovely.

“You glad we came?” I asked.

“There's nothing about this that's easy or at all what you'd call fun, but yes, I am glad we came. Maybe it's a first baby step toward getting things straightened out in my head.”

“Closure, you mean?”

“I doubt I'll ever have closure, the way he died. But I mean, just trying to understand what really happened, get a better sense of what's real and what isn't.”

There was that knotty word again,
real
.

“You said you wanted to go through his papers, bills and things, before we head back?” I asked, moving us away from the subject as we gathered our things and folded the blanket.

“The lawyer says it's necessary to get the estate in order.”

Back up at the cottage we divided tasks. I volunteered to go through what there was of his bookseller accounts, see if there were any outstanding invoices that needed to be settled and, as well, if he was owed money by anyone in the trade. Meghan would attend to utility bills and the like.

His bookseller files were, I had to believe, even messier than I think Adam himself had kept them. The investigators had rifled through these documents and returned them in a couple of bankers boxes, having found either nothing useful or something of interest they'd followed up on with no result. A couple of invoices did appear to need payment. These I set aside. I felt compelled, for reasons that escape me, to reorganize the files chronologically, put them back the way I thought they should go by year, month, bookseller name. It was meditative, I suppose, and I'd had just enough of the wine and ocean air to feel a mellow serenity settle over me even in the midst of such a curious and in many ways awful task.

Then I came upon a document that snatched my breath away. A typewritten invoice for a clutch of seventeen unpublished letters by Arthur Conan Doyle pertaining to
The Hound of the Baskervilles
together with a manuscript fragment from the same work. What? The seller's name on the rather amateurish invoice, torn out of one of those generic pads that anyone could purchase from a stationer's shop, was not one I recognized. Or, no, I did. Henry Slader. This had to be the same person the police had mentioned. The address was Dobbs Ferry, a leafy hamlet a short distance up the Hudson from New York. No date or any indication whether Diehl had paid, though I assumed he had since there appeared to be no follow-up notices. On the back of the invoice was a column of numbers, handwritten in pencil, that I couldn't interpret other than to guess that they might represent further debts. I was stunned, stupefied. This suggested—no, it
meant
that Adam Diehl had not forged the cache of documents that I had so admired, envied, and, I must admit, even hated him at times for having conceived and brought into being. I glanced at Meghan, who was poring over bills at another table at the far end of the studio, and, seeing that she was focused on her task, silently folded the bill and slipped it into my pants pocket. Whoever this Slader was, I intended to find out. As we drove back to the city that evening, Meghan asked me why I was so quiet.

“Just thinking about how lives can get so complicated in ways we don't have much control over. Adam's, I mean.”

“Well, I'm sorry he's not around to complicate life any more,” she said, wistful, looking at the Patek Philippe, which she had secured loosely around her wrist, tightening its buckle as far as it would go.

He is, though, I thought, as I reached over and squeezed her hand.

D
OBBS FERRY IS KIND OF
a riverside version of Montauk, at least in the sense that Manhattan is so proximate and yet feels light-years away. Having taken the day off from work and telling Meghan I wanted to do some solo book scouting—there are very good shops in the area with shelves bowing under the weight of first editions, and I needed to take a break—I drove up the Saw Mill River Parkway, turned off at the exit I'd looked up earlier, and found my way to the address listed on Henry Slader's invoice. I had already tried to look him up in both dealer directories and the phone book but didn't find him listed. Admittedly, I wasn't surprised by his absence from the grid but did have to wonder why in the world he would have provided Adam with an invoice in the first place rather than make a cash deal for the Sherlock Holmes archive, sidestep the paperwork, and call it a day. A banner day at that.

As I pulled onto the street, I felt both foolish—some faux private eye on his first stakeout—and unnerved—what was I going to do if I did locate Henry Slader? Ask him if perchance he had a lost Sherlock tale lying around the workroom? It was a residential lane, more suburban than rural, with neat houses up and down the block flanked by mature chestnut, oak, and maple trees in full June glory and green, green grass. Meant he worked at home, just as I did once upon a time. I brought my car to a stop across the street from a modest red brick, two-story house. Oddly, or at least unexpectedly, some children's toys were scattered about on the lawn—a pink foam soccer ball, a small bicycle lying on its side, colorful plastic tassels dangling from the handlebar butts. Other than this evidence of liveliness, the stodgy facade of the house, with its black front door centered between two windows, shades half-drawn, looked like a man lost in slumber. Before climbing out of the car to go knock on that dark door, I hesitated, wondering if I really, truly wanted to awaken the sleeper. It wasn't as if I knew what I was going to ask or say, although I had toured through all kinds of scenarios in my head over the days and nights after Meghan and I returned from Montauk. How did you know Adam? What else did you sell him? How did you ever manage to pull off that splendid Baskerville fabrication? Who the hell are you?

The woman who opened the door was too old to be the mother of young children. White hair tucked up into a loose bun, a wrinkled royal blue housedress. Of all things, she pressed a ball of tissue paper to her left nostril. “Can I help you with something?”

Swallowing back my disconcertment at her nosebleed, I said, “I'm looking for Henry Slader,” peering past her into the foyer. “He lives here, right?”

“Did. I rented him an apartment at the back of the house. But he left a couple months ago. If you know him, I got mail for him.”

Here I hesitated. This was a line probably not to be crossed, although I wanted to say, Yes, thanks, I'll get it to him. She could easily have caught me out on such a schoolboy ruse, however, and I half-wondered if her easy offer wasn't a setup. “I know someone who knew him, my girlfriend's brother.”

“Well, I'm sorry but I can't help you. I have no idea where he went or I'd forward him his mail.”

“Would you happen to remember if an Adam Diehl ever visited him? Tallish guy with red hair, book collector.”

She needed no time to consider the question. “He never had no visitors, except for some police who wanted to ask him about something out in Long Island. He didn't know nothing about it, was what he said. So I'm sorry but—” and she lifted away the bloodied tissue, frowned at it, shrugged, and sighed. “I wish I could help you but I'm afraid I can't.”

“Mom, what is it?” a woman in her thirties asked, appearing abruptly by her side in the doorway with a young boy, clearly the owner of the ball and bike, in tow.

“This gentleman is looking for Mr. Slader.”

“Oh,” she said, as the boy pressed past her and myself, heading for the front yard to play. “We have some mail of his. Mostly catalogues it looks like.”