The Forgers (8 page)

Without a thought, I leapt on this unexpected second chance. “I was telling your mother here that my girlfriend's brother knows him and—”

“Great,” she said, disappeared for a moment while the boy's grandmother and I, each of us distracted, watched him kick his soccer ball around.

As I drove back to the city, I realized my purloined invoice might simply have been one among others the authorities had found, followed up on, and deemed too insubstantial to pursue further. Had they known—how could they have?—that the Baskerville letters were not what they appeared to be, they might have looked into it further. They didn't, but I had to. At the same time, I quarreled with myself about having taken Slader's mail. The vague claim I would try to get it to him was so obviously specious—why would I come looking for him in Dobbs Ferry if I knew where he was?—that I was embarrassed for his landlady and her daughter when they accepted my offer. But I couldn't help myself. The catalogues and a couple of letters sat next to me on the passenger seat, accusatory, yes, but also promising. Enough illegitimacy seemed to hover, like thick blinding fog, around Henry Slader that I knew these were my only hope of figuring out his story. Paranoid, I kept glancing in the rearview mirror expecting to see revolving bright lights atop a squad car, the landlady in the front seat pointing her finger at me, the forging, mail-thieving felon, as the police bore down. Patent lunacy, to be sure. I would never see those people again in my life.

Back in my apartment that afternoon, I opened the letters first. To my dismay, both were of the uselessly anonymous To Whom It May Concern variety. Discouraged, I next tore open the envelopes of the three antiquarian bookseller catalogues. These were a bit more auspicious. Two of the dealers were well established—indeed, I had already received both offerings in the mail some while back—but the other, from Pennsylvania, wasn't known to me. That wasn't altogether unusual, as the world is full of part-time dabblers in the trade, well-meaning decent book people who vend their stuff online and at rural fairs, who display secondhand volumes in the back of antique stores or in book barns, who keep their stock in dry basements or spare bedrooms. The book world was a crazy quilt of devotees who often shared little else than a rabid passion for the printed page. I couldn't, and didn't, know every bookseller out there, not by a thousand country miles.

My two known contacts, both in New York City, were kind enough to look up their current customer information for Slader, only to find that he had not updated his address beyond Dobbs Ferry. My excuse for asking was reasonable, as I told them I owed him some money and couldn't locate him. They had no better idea where he was than I did. One quipped, “Wish every customer we've got was as diligent about their bills as you.” Rather than approach the Pennsylvania dealer, who didn't know me from, well, Adam, I called Atticus, with whom I had gone through the excruciating fire of apology, restitution, and slow deliberate reconciliation, and now enjoyed as close a friendship as a somewhat wary forgiveness allowed. His reply fascinated me.

“He shares some of your same interests, back when you were selling and buying.”

“I still buy,” I countered. “I just don't sell anymore.”

“Well, he sells more than buys. Or used to. Hasn't been around for a while.”

While I digested what he'd said, the silence must have been telling, as his tone of voice changed when he asked me if there was something regarding Henry Slader he needed to worry about.

Assuring him that Slader wasn't anyone to concern himself with, I explained that Meghan and I had gone through her brother's papers a couple of weeks ago and we found something there from him that needed to be addressed, is all.

“Just trying to tie up whatever loose ends on the estate that we can.”

“They solve the murder?”

“Not yet,” I said.

“That's crazy. You're a Sherlock Holmes man, must drive you up the wall that there aren't his kind around these days to make things right. Not to mention poor Meghan Diehl.”

Feeling more like Professor Moriarty than Mr. Holmes, I thanked him and rang off.

As for the Pennsylvania dealer, I telephoned and attempted to order a couple of books that I imagined, based on what I had just learned, might be in Slader's taste. Both were already sold. I desperately wanted to ask who bought them but realized I had reached a hard stone wall at the end of this particular path in the maze. I was stymied. When the dealer, not recognizing my voice, asked if I was on his mailing list for future catalogues, I said, Thanks, no, and hung up. My trip to Dobbs Ferry, my pathetic little theft, my hopeful, fibbing phone calls—all of it was for naught. Even after dinner that night, when Meghan asked me to show her the books I had scored on my Hudson Valley pilgrimage, I had to admit the trip was a bust.

“Not a single book? That's so unlike you,” she said.

“I guess I'm too distracted right now to think about buying books.”

“But I thought that was part of the idea for going. Get your mind off things.”

“Well, it didn't work, I'm afraid.”

Why I kept the truth from her, I couldn't say in so many words. It was, as the phrase has it, a gut decision. In point of fact, I knew Henry Slader only somewhat less than Adam Diehl, intimately connected to me as I intuited they each were, and in ways beyond my seemingly paltry comprehension.

I
N THE MONTHS AFTER
that fruitless visit to Dobbs Ferry, I began to slip into what others might view as a mild, general depression but what I saw basically as a desperate defeat that came from being divided from what I loved. I am not, of course, referring to Meghan, whom I adored and who returned my love daily with great devotion, patience, and kindness. Indeed, it was Meghan who, on seeing my mood swing more often into the darker registers as the months moved on through autumn into early winter, asked me if we might not want to go away, get out of the city and our routines, finally take that trip to Italy we had been talking about, or the Caribbean, somewhere warm for Christmas.

I thought, Why not? My work at the auction house had clicked into a coglike routine, and although I liked working with all the inscribed books and various documents, gained lots of new knowledge by being proximate to so many historically interesting materials, a routine was a routine, devoid of risk, of adventure, of anything that made my heart quicken. I was lucky to have a job, I knew, but it was just and only that, a job rather than a calling. Any hopes I might have had about locating and possibly confronting Henry Slader had dwindled away so swiftly that at times he seemed more a mirage or dream than an actual person out there somewhere, living and breathing and fencing fakes, sometimes flawed, other times exquisite, to other unsuspecting Adam Diehls of the world. Slader was, I had to admit, a dead end. It was healthiest for me to forget about the man. I could have gone to the police with my suspicions about him but, first, they were merely suspicions extrapolated from an old invoice for some forged Sherlock Holmes papers, which were now, innocently yet damningly, in my possession. And second, perhaps more important, I'd had enough of cops, thank you, and worried my action would one way or another come back to haunt me. So I told Meghan that, yes, getting out of New York for the holidays was a great idea. I left the decision up to her as to where we would go and she surprised me by reserving tickets not for the Italian coast or the French Riviera or even the Caribbean, but her birthplace, Ireland—a direct flight to Dublin.

“Sure, it'll be chilly, but we can bundle up. You know I've been longing to go. And besides, you like manuscripts so much, I thought it was high time you get to see the finest one of them all.”

I pondered for a moment, ticking through the pantheon of Irish writers from the last couple hundred years, then realized she had in mind something far earlier, the ninth century.

“Trinity College? The Book of Kells. You're brilliant,” I said, genuinely moved by her thoughtfulness. For anyone interested in the highest calligraphic arts, in the illuminated manuscript lifted to the level of pure divinity, the Book of Kells was the ultimate lodestone destination. I had owned a handsome folio facsimile edition since my teens, when my parents had given it to me for my birthday. Now I would see the real thing.

“And for me,” Meghan added, “a pilgrimage over to Drumcliff and Yeats's grave will do just fine.”

“Not to mention a couple of pints in Sligo Town. All perfect. Better than perfect.”

As the time drew closer for our trip, my mood did brighten even though the reason for my periodic dejection remained very much in place, a fault—for it was a fault, and all of my own doing—I tried my best to hide.

You see, I must make another confession in order to clarify. Addiction is always stronger than the addict. Or at least my addiction was. The degradation of arrest, all the attendant humiliations that followed, the loss of so many friends in the book trade, the long daily grinding journey back into society—none of these, each of which convulsed through my life like a merciless hurricane, deterred my eventual return to the forger's art. Even my lemons-into-lemonade resurrection as a legitimate handwriting expert and scholarly cataloguer couldn't save me from my truer self. It was probably my love for Meghan that held me back from a complete reversion to form, sweet Meghan who had remained at my side throughout the entire season of hell and even now, despite her own loss, was protective of me. But alone in the evening, left to my own devices, I found myself practicing, writing out some cherished Thomas Hardy poems in the master's hand, penning Churchill's famous “We shall fight on the beaches . . . we shall fight in the fields and in the streets . . . we shall never surrender” speech in Sir Winston's script, and of course conjuring some will-o'-the-wisp Conan Doyle notes toward a “lost” essay in which he confesses to being the mastermind behind the Piltdown Man forgery. This latter was an idea I had toyed around with since my early twenties, when I first learned about the Piltdown hoax and theories that once abounded connecting Sherlock Holmes's creator to it. He was, after all, a retired doctor and amateur archaeologist who collected old bones, and he certainly had the necessary knowledge as well as shrewd brilliance to pull off such a convincing stunt. Mine was as good an idea as the Piltdowner's himself, whoever he truly was.

Not without pangs of reluctance, I crumpled up these undeniably masterful doodlings and threw them out with the food scraps. Once stung, and all that. But forgery is as difficult a mistress to quit as she is to master, and before long I found myself keeping some of the finer examples for my own personal enjoyment. I knew I was but one step away from the garden path I'd already been down but trusted myself not to go that far. The sirens might be singing, to layer in another fine cliché, but I knew their song by heart and kept their invitation at bay.

Our trip, wonderful in every way and restorative to us each, lifted my obsession from me for the two weeks we were in Ireland from just before Christmas and into the New Year. Even when the weather was rainy and wet chill wrapped itself around the very marrow of our bones, we went about our tourist ways, visiting the famous Cliffs of Moher in the fog and St. Patrick's Cathedral in the drizzle, and we were happy. And as for myself, I was for a time dispossessed of even so much as thinking about what to do regarding my recent tendencies toward relapse. Because I had packed none of my writing implements or anything else necessary to create a forgery, I couldn't have acted upon my impulses even if I'd wanted to. No way meant no will. What was more, everyone here was friendly, open, kind, and none of them—aside from a couple of booksellers to whom I didn't introduce myself when Meghan and I visited their shops in Dublin and Galway—had a clue or concern about who I was and what I'd done in the past. I was a blank slate with no shameful history and nothing to hide. I had forgotten how delicious anonymity was, especially the kind of anonymity that involves not looking over one's shoulder.

On a particularly nasty night in a pretty lodge in Kenmare, on the southwest coast of the country, Meghan and I were having dinner in the hotel restaurant as the wind whipped against the windows and the sky lit up now and then with silent lightning. We were nearing the end of our vacation and were in an especially peaceful mood. A peat fire burned bright and warm, giving off its earthen scent in the fireplace near our table, its flames dancing on our claret glasses like animate spirits, and without forethought or design I asked Meghan to marry me.

“You sure that wine hasn't gone to your head?” she teased, her eyes welling.

“I'm sure I want to marry you. What do you say?” I told her, tightening my grasp of her hands on the table.

“I say ‘Yes I said yes I will Yes.
'
”

“That's totally shameless, quoting Joyce in Ireland. A simple ‘yes' will do.”

“Then the answer's simply yes,” and with that we reached across the table and kissed before signing for dinner and taking the unfinished bottle to our room upstairs.

Back in Manhattan, the aura of happiness did not dissipate. At least for a while. We were quietly married at City Hall downtown. Meghan's staff threw a lively reception for us at the bookshop, with homemade hors d'oeuvres and champagne, bouquets of white flowers that matched the snow delicately falling outside, and a carrot cake with raisins—Meghan's favorite—topped by a vintage kitschy plastic bride-and-groom statuette. Atticus even made the trek down and presented us with some high-end Irish whiskies wrapped in fancy foil—Green Spot, Connemara, Redbreast. Despite the bitter cold, the night was radiant. We walked home through fresh-fallen drifts of snow that muffled the usual sounds of the city and smoothed away its hard edges. Few others were out and about so late, and it felt as if we were among the last living beings in this fantastical white world.