The Forger's Daughter

by Bradford Morrow

  “Please. To answer your question, no, I never laid a finger on the girl. If she claimed otherwise, you might want to talk with her about the perils of lying. It’s something you know a little about.”

  There was no point, I realized, in pursuing it further, and I certainly hadn’t come here to rehash ancient history. I would always loathe Slader, and he, me.

  “That was quite some calling card you left,” I said.

  A waitress came by the table and asked what we’d like to drink. I ordered a Jameson. “Seltzer on the rocks with lime,” Slader told her, then confided after she’d left, “Abstinence is one of the many bad habits I learned in lockup.”

  “No doubt. But the Poe. It’s a blue-ribbon fake, I must say. Did you do it?”

  Slader laughed, looked away with a cough, then back. I’d forgotten how dark his eyes were, ebony in this dimly lit bar. “You’re the one who’s apparently graduated to letterpress printing. Me, I’m just a hopeless, out-of-date calligrapher. A cursive dinosaur.”

  “I wouldn’t call letterpress any less out-of-date than calligraphy. So if you didn’t forge it, who did? And why put it in my hands? I don’t want to have anything to do with the thing.”

  Slader thanked the server, crushed his lime into the sparkling water. “That ‘thing’ is worth north of a million, you know. On the right day, in the right auction room, I could see it going for two.”

  “Why not three?” I asked with a smirk.

  “You’re right. Why not three? Let the hammer drop where it may.”

  “Please.”

  “You think I exaggerate? There are a lot of well-heeled collectors out there who want this book, the Holy Grail of American letters. Not to mention libraries. Three would shatter all records, but it doesn’t seem out of the question. All it takes is two determined bidders of means who are willing to chase one of the greatest rarities of them all.”

  Were it genuine, Slader wasn’t altogether mistaken. For a copy in original wrappers, sky would be the limit in the rooms. I had done research before heading over and learned there are no known copies of Tamerlane inscribed by its author. The slim volume emerged into an indifferent world where it not only received no reviews but where, when its young author published his second book, Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane and Minor Poems, in 1829—a book that did gain Poe some attention, mixed reviews being better than none—some people even dismissed his claim that there had ever been an earlier edition of Tamerlane. What insult upon injury, for the public to ignore a poet’s first book, then deny it ever existed to begin with. If that weren’t enough, Poe himself seems not to have kept a copy. And as for Al Aaraaf, there appeared to be only around twenty survivors of the original edition of that book as well. Early Poe is a landscape of almost freakish rareness.

  The first copy of Tamerlane to surface in an institution, I found out, wasn’t until 1876, in London’s British Museum, of all places, where it had been purchased in 1860 along with a batch of other American volumes. It now resides in the British Library. Eight American libraries possess copies—the Lilly in Indiana, the Ransom Center in Austin, the Huntington and Clark in San Marino and Los Angeles, the Free Library in Philadelphia, the Regenstein at the University of Chicago. Manhattan being Manhattan, the Berg Collection at New York Public has two, one with its cover intact, the other with no cover at all. Two copies are in private hands. And, to round out the census, the copy that had been housed in the Alderman Library at the University of Virginia—it bore a romantic inscription, now faded to near invisibility, from one Phatimer Kinsell “to his sweetheart” Mary Reed—went missing in 1974, and remains lost to this day. Totus est.

  “Is it the one lifted from Virginia?” I asked, emerging from my stream of thought.

  “That’s a reasonable speculation, but no. Under infrared light there’s no sign of the inscription that’s unique to the Alderman copy. According to rumor, that was an inside job and whoever ripped it off, or paid for it to be lifted, doesn’t dare bring it to market. Either way, not the same animal.”

  Before I’d left the house, Meghan was still upset about my meeting with this man who had attacked me. “It’s deranged, your willingness to talk with him. You know what happens to the moth drawn to flame,” she said. “What’s the matter with you?”

  However much I disliked Slader, however much I distrusted and resented him, I couldn’t help but admire the knowledge he possessed. He could fairly be accused of many ills and iniquities, but ignorance wasn’t one of them. Besides, if there was any chance the Tamerlane was real, it was imperative I get it out of our house. I even considered bringing it with me to give it back, but that same possibility, ironically, in fact precluded my doing so. Black tulips don’t belong in bars. Part of me also believed, perhaps wrongly, that by keeping it in my safe for the short term, I might have more leverage in my discussion with Slader.

  “Is it one of the two copies held privately? Stolen, in other words?”

  Slader stared at the lime wedge in his drink, shaking his head.

  “It’s the thirteenth copy,” he said, raising his eyes as he clasped his hands on the small table. His gesture and the cryptic look on his face conveyed a curious blend of self-assurance and, what, gravity, anxiety. In my few but unforgettable encounters with Henry Slader I had never seen anything on his face other than arrogance in its many forms. On the other hand, in times past we had never discussed such a legendary rarity.

  “Well,” I muttered, taking a drink of my whiskey. “If so, it’s an historic find, one of the first magnitude, front-page newspaper material, but—”

  “True enough,” he interjected. “The last copy discovered was sold at Sotheby’s thirty years back, and the eleventh copy came to public light a little over thirty years before that, in 1954, if I’m not mistaken.”

  “All very correct and interesting,” I said, quite sincerely. Then, just as sincerely, I told him, “I still don’t want to have anything to do with it, or you.”

  Undaunted, his full confidence returning, he said, “With me, I understand. But unless you destroy it, which I doubt you’ll want to do, or turn it in to the police, which I equally don’t see you doing, as I’m positive it would raise more questions than you’d be able to answer, I don’t think you have much choice.”

  “You’re wrong,” I countered, and signaled the server for another round.

  “By the way, did your lovely wife tell you about her little visitation the other night? Your adopted daughter isn’t the only one who saw a ghost. She’s just the one who screamed.”

  “I’m sure I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “After all these years of wedded bliss, I would have thought you didn’t keep secrets from each other,” he sneered, leaning forward. “Well, of course, there’s always that one.”

  My patience with Slader was running thin. Yet I had to admit that, while I was sitting alone with Tamerlane most of the previous day, in the wake of its tumultuous entry into my life, an old forbidden passion had been reawakened. I’d reread the accompanying letter that was so exquisitely, if perfidiously, rendered in Poe’s distinctive script, and felt grudging admiration. Like shoplifters and adulterers and drug addicts, forgers do experience a contact high that rivals religious rapture, though they often come to regret their fleeting, immoral gratification. While I loathed the rotten part of my heart that was drawn to forgery, it would be a falsehood to claim it wasn’t alluring.

  For one as emotionally tortured as Poe, his penmanship was, particularly after he had graduated from his teens, quite methodical and legible. His words were spaced evenly, his baseline was often as straight as the raven flies, his letters angled to the right with ascenders pointed like a row of robust cypress trees bent a bit by the wind. If, as Poe himself believed, handwriting is a window into one’s soul—“that a strong analogy does generally exist between every man’s chirography and character will be denied by n
one but the unreflecting,” he wrote—then the author knew his mind, based on the surviving evidence, given how infrequently he struck out words. Yes, sometimes whole passages were excised by his drawing neat vertical lines, angled a bit like a tepee with no top. But Poe was no James Joyce, who crossed out and rewrote most every phrase he set to paper, then crossed out the rewrites too. Edgar’s handwriting suggested to me that his ideas came to him in strong steady waves. And this remained true, although his hand did evolve and change from the earliest to the middle and late phases of his writing life. His signature varied as well during different eras, from self-consciously stylized to childlike; rounded to angular; sometimes elaborately underscored, other times naked of ornament. He was something of a chirographic chimera.

  “I’ll be sure to ask her,” I said finally. “But don’t give yourself too much credit. Chances are, whatever you’re talking about, she forgot.”

  “Doubtful, very,” Slader whispered, with a cocksure smirk that made him seem a bit of an idiot, even though I knew he was anything but.

  At that moment, as I looked this man in the eye, I was reminded of Hanlon’s razor, a philosophical notion that states one should never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity. It occurred to me just then that, conversely, one ought never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by malice. But for the Poe at home in my fireproof safe, I would have terminated our tête-à-tête right there and then. As things stood, I made my decision, and framed it in questions.

  “Where did you get it?”

  “You sure you want to know? It might implicate you.”

  “And what do you want me to do with it?” ignoring his remark.

  Our drinks arrived. I took an ample swallow.

  Odd and confounding, Slader lazily stirred the ice in his glass of seltzer with his forefinger, and as he did I caught him staring at my right hand. My instinct was to remove it from the table and place it in my lap where he couldn’t see the consequences of his malicious act but, feeling peevish, I left it in plain view. Let him see, I thought, what he had done. Too much time had passed in the wake of my two straightforward questions, but I added nothing further.

  He broke the strange, momentary spell, asking a question of his own. “You remember our mutual friend, Atticus Moore?”

  “What about him.”

  “You used to be one of his best suppliers of high spots”—as crème de la crème first editions were known in the trade, books that helped mold literary history—“even when you weren’t foisting forgeries on him.” Before I could counter with accusations of my own, Slader raised his hands, warding me off. “I know, I know. I sold him stock myself, some of it golden, some not so much. But long before you consigned him your father’s collection and shipped off to Ireland, you had always provided him with great material. I even bought something now and again when I could afford to—”

  “Where is all this going?”

  Slader half grinned, half leered, and as he did I noticed one of his front lower teeth was chipped. Prison legacy, I hypothesized. I also noticed one of the men seated at the bar kept glancing over at us, clumsily trying to eavesdrop. Heavyset guy with ginger hair, roundish face, khaki short-sleeved shirt, and cargo pants, more observant of me and Slader than any of the other barflies. Without so much as a thought, I winked at the man and, startled, he looked away.

  “The obvious reason,” Slader continued, “that he was able to continue buying all those expensive books and manuscripts, not just from you but from others, was that he had buyers with serious means.”

  “I know he was the main source for several large institutional accounts,” returning my full focus to our conversation.

  “True, but did he ever discuss his private collectors with you? And, in particular, one named Fletcher?”

  “No, I always figured that was none of my business,” I said. “What’s this Fletcher’s first name?”

  “It was—past tense, mind you—one of those Yankee blue-blood monikers where the given name might as well have been a surname. Garland.”

  “Garland Fletcher,” I said. “Never heard of him, or Fletcher Garland, for that matter.”

  “Fletcher’s widow, Abigail, like Fletcher himself, has roots in Massachusetts going back ten generations or more. Well-heeled types. Super private. And, like her late husband, she’s devoted a lifetime to collecting—a bit haphazardly, according to Atticus—New England antiquities, furniture, paintings, all sorts of other period pieces, many of them passed down through the family.”

  “Including books.”

  “Including books.”

  “Including Tamerlane.”

  He touched his nose, bared that chipped tooth again, before proceeding to tell me, in plausible, even credible, detail, how Poe’s first published effort came into the possession of a Fletcher relative back in early-to-mid-nineteenth-century Boston and had remained in the family for nearly two hundred years. Because the thing had never changed hands, never been donated to a library or sold at auction, never so much as been appraised by an insurance company, and since the Fletchers hadn’t seen fit to let the world know of its existence, it never found its way onto any census of surviving copies. As black tulips went, this was the most midnight black of them all.

  “So what you’re saying is that the widow Fletcher has decided to announce its existence to the world, and Atticus is the one anointed to put it on the market on her behalf. Or, more likely, you’ve stolen it from the Fletchers. Or else Atticus has, and you’re supposed to fence it somehow through me.”

  Slader leaned forward in his seat. “Am I wrong in remembering you as a much cooler cucumber back when you were younger? This rush to conjecture isn’t becoming in one seasoned in the, how should I put it, murkier side of the trade,” he said, his tone as flat as the face of a lake undisturbed by so much as a breeze. “That said, Will, there are elements in each of your notions that aren’t entirely incorrect.”

  Double negatives, always the sign of a prevaricator. And I didn’t like him calling me by my name. I did, however, need to hear the man out. As disheartening as it was to acknowledge the fact, Slader was dangerous to me in ways no one but he and I knew.

  “Abigail Fletcher has no intention of putting Tamerlane on the market. Nor will it be missing from her collection for long.”

  Now I was fully confused, but wasn’t going to give him the pleasure of hearing me admit it. I drank the last finger of Jameson and waited.

  “Think of it as being borrowed during the course of an appraisal of her collection.”

  “Appraisal,” I repeated, as the ploy became clearer.

  “Yes, by a trusted expert in the field. At the moment, its morocco solander box is right where it belongs on Mrs. Fletcher’s bookshelf. Just the pearl hidden inside the shell has been temporarily appropriated while the lady herself is vacationing with friends in the south of France. Somewhere near Avignon, I think,” he said, taking a thoughtful sip from his glass.

  “You’re mad,” I told him. “That’s plain theft. I won’t be involved.”

  Slader slumped back in his chair, exasperated. “You remember that business a few years back when a contractor who was installing a sound system, or maybe security, in a private library figured nobody looked inside all those handsome slipcases, so who would ever miss the treasures they housed?”

  “A small wave of perfect Faulkners and other delectables hitting the market all at once—of course I remember.”

  “That, my friend, was plain theft,” he said, his mouth sinking into a frown. “A decent idea badly executed. We’re not amateurs who think it’s all right to steal part of a library and leave behind a bunch of empty boxes. We’re far more judicious than that. More disciplined, more circumspect. All we’re doing is taking one thin volume and basically putting the same thing back.”

  “I see. Like that 1493 Co
lumbus letter to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella that was switched out from the National Library of Catalonia, then sold for a million by a couple of Italian rare book dealers,” I said. “That scheme worked fine until the authorities figured it out, negotiated the return of the original. They repatriated it earlier this summer, you may remember, in a fancy ceremony at the Spanish ambassador’s residence.”

  “Much better idea, but still a bad execution,” was Slader’s bland response.

  “Bad execution, why’s that?”

  “Because it was discovered is why. The best forgeries are never discovered. You and I know for a fact that we each have work out there in the world that will never be run to ground. That’s my definition of good execution.”

  Once a forger, I thought. I couldn’t argue with the gnarly logic of his statement.

  “But forget Columbus, forget Faulkner. The Poe isn’t even on a very long-term loan. Just long enough until an exact copy can be made to take its place and go back in the book dungeon that is the Fletcher library. Which is why time’s tight.”

  “For you, maybe. Not for me.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong,” he said, brusquely no-nonsense. “You are aware that while our charming criminal justice system puts statutes of limitations on many, even most, crimes, murder ain’t one of them. Some of the stories I heard under lock and key were fascinating. Men who’d been sent up for three to five years for some lesser misdeed would never see the light of day again if the cops knew other, choicer things they’d done back when. Gateway crimes. Things like you yourself have done.”

  Already knowing where Slader was headed with his desperado anecdote, I said, while trying to hide both my disdain and fear, “That’s all fascinating, but what does it have to do with Poe?”

  “Well, as I’m sure you know, he is credited with writing the first detective story and knew his fair share about murder, and not just in the rue Morgue.”