The Forgers

by Bradford Morrow

  “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.

  DOBBS 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.”

  “Woul
d 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.”

  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.

  IN 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.