The Forgers

by Bradford Morrow

  Not surprisingly, the figures added up quickly, but at the same time my conscience was torn in a chaos of different directions. My father, as impeccable a collector as ever existed, would have died a second death if he knew what I proposed to do to get myself out of trouble. While amassing what in the trade are known as “high spots”—famous books that influenced the course of literary history—he specialized in Conan Doyle rarities, Sherlock Holmes having been his childhood hero just as, no doubt directly encouraged by my father, he had been my own. Like Holmes himself, my father had a hawk nose and smoked a pipe. The man had been genial among friends but was a razor-sharp, take-no-prisoners defense attorney with an almost perfect track record, who loved to refer jokingly to this case or that as a two- or three-pipe problem. He would always go the distance for you if you were fair, honest, and direct, but if you misled or cheated him he had the instincts of that hawkish nose of his and would hand you your heart wrapped in butcher’s paper and tied with a silk ribbon.

  What I considered a hundred-pipe problem my father would simply have dismissed as empty threats and undeserving of so much as pulling out the tobacco pouch and pipe knife. But that was him, not me. And what was more, if he witnessed me, with whom he had shared the love of book collecting for so many years, now proposing to bail myself out of this degenerate mess of my own doing, would he have had any choice other than to hand me my loathsome heart bundled up in that butcher’s paper? I realized I simply couldn’t sell off all of his life’s joy, the last of his fond treasures from my long-gone boyhood that I still possessed.

  I made a decision. Negotiating a devil’s pact with myself, one forged from shame, I determined to keep the highest of the high spots and—this made my chest flutter, I’m sorry to acknowledge—“improve” many of the lesser, though still quite desirable, volumes. It would have to be the absolute finest work I had ever done, immaculate and utterly beyond question or reproach. I would have to conceive and execute quickly, while Meg was busy at the shop. Phoning work the next morning after she had left, I announced, through a din of forced coughs, that I’d been felled by a nasty cold and needed to take some sick days. My boss said it was fine, feel better. They had an auction coming up to coincide with the Armory show, and my work on the catalogue was long since done, anyway, so I wouldn’t be missed.

  My hand and eye behaved as if I were a decade younger—agile, knowing, sure, deft, powerfully subtle—and my conceits as to who the recipients of these generous inscriptions were in volume after volume showed the maturity of one a decade older, so inventive were they, extravagant yet inarguable in their plausibility. The copies were already in exceptional condition, most of them housed in quarter morocco clamshell boxes and slipcases from earlier decades. And because my father, unlike many a more amateurish collector, rarely if ever showed off his collection to others, nearly all of his books—from Hawthorne to Twain, Wilde to Hammett, and so on down the line—had been out of circulation for a generation or more and, above all, had not been seen since by anyone aside from myself. I was careful to forge inscriptions and autographs only in first editions of authors I was comfortable with while also trying to work outside the canons of those authors with whom I’d been associated when I was caught.

  At lunch, over salad Niçoise and a carafe of Merlot, my head cold miraculously cured, I broached my offer to Atticus. “Meghan and I have had such a rough year that we’ve been talking about going overseas for a while, traveling together a little, taking time off from work and obligations and all the rest, and to cut a long story short I’ve decided to sell my library, the good stuff, the real stuff, obviously, along with much of my father’s library.”

  At the mention of my father’s books, he became as attentive as a cat cornering a mouse, or else a mouse cornered by a cat.

  “You know what a great collector he was,” I added, perhaps unnecessarily.

  “You’re prejudiced, but I’ve heard that said about him many times over the years. He’s a bit of a legend.”

  “Well, this is all in strictest confidence,” I said and seeing him nod, the look on his face serious and thoughtful, continued. “After that nasty business some years ago about the forging and all, I was pretty wiped out financially. Work at the auction house only pays so much. Meghan sold off the family house in Montauk for a sizable chunk and would be perfectly willing for us to use that money to go away. But I don’t think that’s fair.”

  “I see. So you want to sell what’s essentially your family inheritance, your father’s books, to even things. Makes sense. You want to consign me the collection, you’re saying?”

  “No, I want to sell it outright, and because you’ve always been good to me, forgiven me when I needed forgiving, I’m willing to let it go extremely reasonably.”

  He pondered this, poured more wine for each of us from the carafe. “How can I be absolutely sure there aren’t some of your old rotten apples buried in the barrel?”

  “You can bring over any expert you want to look through them all, one at a time, I don’t care. Not that you’re not the best expert there is when it comes to a lot of these writers.”

  “Flattery may get you everywhere but it also makes me nervous. No offense.”

  “None taken. Not all the books are inscribed, anyway, but most are. A lot of nice association copies.”

  “Well, no harm in having a look at what we’re talking about,” he said and asked for the check. “My turn.”

  I made us some fresh coffee in my apartment and, after calling his assistant to tell her to finish setting up their booth as he was possibly buying some stock, he sat down to look over the books. One by one, I handed them to him, removing and afterward replacing them in their elegant enclosures, explaining who this or that recipient was when he didn’t know off the top of his head. Like any seasoned bookman, he carefully placed them in piles based on value, the rarest of them going on a table in an adjacent room for separate appraisal. He seemed satisfied with the authenticity of almost all the works, though cast aside several that seemed suspect or “not right,” as he put it. Nor was he wrong in thinking so.

  “Anything you don’t want, don’t take. You have to be happy.”

  Several long hours transpired before he finally asked, “What kind of money are you thinking?”

  I told him I felt that the library was conservatively worth two and a half million retail. More than half a dozen volumes were in the hundred-thousand-dollar range alone, and my 1922 Ulysses—the true first, limited to one hundred signed copies, absolutely correct and with its original Aegean-sea-colored blue wrappers in pristine condition, one of my best investments as a collector and a book I truly hated to part with—was worth three hundred easily. That got it to the first million in quick order.

  “I want fifty percent of retail,” I said. “One and a quarter.”

  “Well, I appreciate that, but I’ve got a lot of work ahead of me here to get back to even. What about eight hundred.”

  Such negotiations were always a dance. We had both done them often enough that the dance felt choreographed much of the time. I knew this was going to be my last dance, the last gesture save one that would ever involve me in books or manuscripts, anything having to do with literary artifacts.

  “What about a million and call it done,” I said.

  “Done,” said he, reaching out to shake my hand. He would have to call his bank in the morning to arrange a transfer. “Don’t think I have that much sitting in the account, but I can get a short-term loan if need be. They’ve done it for me before.”

  “One last thing,” I said, resting my palm on the Ulysses slipcase as one might on the belly of a sleeping child. “I think it would behoove us not to tell anybody, ever, about this transaction, where you got the books, anything along those lines. My name is mud, some might even say shit, in many circles, as you know. Why needlessly taint such really great books?”

  He smiled. “I’m glad you said that, not me. I haven’t the least intention of letting on w
here they came from. A lot of this will be going straight into private collections, anyway. If I didn’t have collectors lined up for some of these bigger ticket items, I wouldn’t be making the purchase. I hope this helps you. You and Meghan deserve happiness.”

  It broke my heart to hear him say that. I wanted to tell him I’d changed my mind, it was all a mistake, I wanted to keep the books after all. But I couldn’t do that and survive what I knew was a looming threat to my future and freedom. Meghan deserved happiness, yes. But for myself, the abysmal guilt I felt at that moment, a guilt I knew I would carry like a virulent cancer, always growing incrementally, became at one with me and melded with all the other guilt I already wore inside me like festering organs hung on the clothesline of my collarbone. I smiled at him and said, “Thank you.”

  Meghan was shocked by what I had done without consulting her, although she conceded that I had mentioned the possibility more than once in the past. When I told her the reasoning behind my decision to sell—that I wanted to be a more equal partner in our fledgling marriage—she embraced me, saying we had always been equals and always would be, and for a fleeting moment my guilt was washed away. Besides, I told her, hoping to muddy the waters about the amount of money that had traded hands, I kept a number of mementos from my father’s collection. Some, I assured her, were among his favorite volumes of Sherlock Holmes stories for us to pass down the generations.

  We did attend the Armory show, which was more crowded than ever. As expected, some booksellers were reserved and polite, others less so, yet others were amicable and congratulated us on the marriage. Curiously, only a few mentioned Adam, expressed their regrets about his death, even though he had been a constant presence here during past fairs. New collectors, I supposed, had simply stepped in to scout the books he once did. Also, it went without saying that given his dabbling in the forger’s world, his demise was, to some, good riddance. The farmer does not lament the fox’s death. As I inspected book after glorious book, my disciplined gaze always studying the cursive hand and the crude, I was impressed by how few forgeries I encountered. Egotistical as it may sound, I had to wonder if my now-years-ago downfall hadn’t scared others away, driven them into some alternative way of eking out a living.

  Which brought me to Henry Slader. Not that he hadn’t been foremost in my mind from the instant Meghan and I climbed the canopied steps that led up from the sidewalk and entered the Armory. I was sure that somewhere in this cavernous hall, echoing with the voices of intellectuals and investors, buyers and sellers, Slader lurked. My attention was divided, though I did my best to conceal it from Meghan. Whenever I caught anyone looking at me for one single beat longer than seemed natural, I became suspicious, kept an eye on what booth they were in, where they were headed next. I half-expected him to use the comparative safety of the crowd to walk up to me and make a direct confrontation, sotto voce, just two men discussing a transaction, like so many others who were here, elbow to elbow, some in suits, others in jeans—books, not clothes, made the man in this venue—working out deals. But no such confrontation took place. Again I found myself wondering if the threatening letters truly had any meaning and whether my marathon of producing the finest forgeries of my life and selling most of my collection wasn’t a fool’s errand. If so, I thought, so be it. I felt oddly liberated having done what I did. Liberated from the weight of ownership, yes, and also liberated from the art of forgery, my onetime obsession, because I knew I would never again set pen to paper in that once-erotic, now-exhausted enterprise.

  Then I saw him. I didn’t know it was him, since how could I? But I knew the face from somewhere. His look oddly combined confidence with furtiveness, disdain with a kind of nervous shyness. His head wasn’t shaved but it might as well have been, so tightly shorn was his dark hair to his skull. He was dressed casually, in black like so many other New Yorkers, so far as I could see, though he was several booths away and browsers kept blocking our view of each other. Meghan and I were in the booth of a smart, interesting dealer in photography books, which in recent years had become fashionable and Croesus-expensive to collect. Meg was very much in her element here, given her interest in visual art folios. I told her I’d be back in a minute and she said “great” without looking up from a Walker Evans volume that enthralled her.

  Nervous as I had ever been but knowing I had his blood money, I threaded my way past fairgoers in his direction. Rather than approaching me, as I had expected, he melted into the crowd. I stood where I was and peered ahead, looking for that face to reappear. Where had I seen him before?

  Soon enough there he was again, farther away this time, closer to the exit, looking over his shoulder at me but not signaling me to follow, standing there like a lurid apparition. It was then I recognized who he was. Of course, I thought. Last year at Adam’s graveside service. The plainclothes cop. The man I’d assumed was there in search of a murderer compelled to visit if not the scene of his crime then some proximate scene that might make his crime feel less abstract, more real.

  Slader must have read my thoughts at that moment, because his pale face slowly broke into a faint smile. He tipped his chin down and then snapped it back up. Yes, this is me, his gestures meant. Rather than turn on my heel and walk away, rather than remain stock still, as physically frozen as I was mentally, I nodded in acknowledgment. But acknowledgment of what? Was I conceding I had murdered Adam Diehl when in fact Slader himself had more reason to commit such an act than I ever did? Look at him. Even if he didn’t have the stock face of a killer, a visage bleak and ruthless and with an old knife scar on his cheek, say, he did look determined, single-minded, a taker. My fear of the man mutated into a feeling more akin to anger, even hatred. Who did he think he was? It seemed reasonable that I ought to walk right past him, ignoring anything he might say to me, and speak to the uniformed guard who stood by the exit, tell him there was a murderer in the building, finger Henry Slader then and there, and let the chips fall where they may. The wall that stood between me and that rash action was my newfound happiness with Meghan, my marriage and the dream of a life together away from here, from all the sorrows and strife we had known. Too, if Slader was arrested, my fresh sale of counterfeits would doubtless be discovered, since he would sing the same accusatory song as I did and turn rigorous scrunity right back at me, landing me, no doubt, behind bars again. This time for a very long stretch and with no Meghan to greet me when I was finally released. As I saw it, there was one sole path for me to get out of this predicament. A scree-strewn, hazardous path with a guide I loathed but was bound to follow.

  I looked down, up, and he was gone. Realizing Meghan must be wondering where I was—though she was altogether aware that I tended to wander off and lose myself at these fairs—I made my way down the crowded corridor toward where Slader had stood, looking for him in the milling throng and, seeing him nowhere, returned to the photography booth. Not finding my wife there, I panicked. Had Slader doubled back to speak with her directly while I stood mesmerized in an aisle nearer the exit? As a child I got lost only once, having wandered away from my mother in a department store, and the same wretched feelings of terror and abandonment that seized me then did so now. In a sweat, I now found myself searching out two people, one loved, the other hated. Five relentless minutes passed as I made my way around the fair in a sweat, bumping into people and muttering apologies like some fool, not knowing what I would do if I encountered Slader and Meghan together.

  “There you are,” Meghan said, her hand laid on my shoulder from behind. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine, no worries,” I managed.

  “You sure? You look like you saw a ghost.”

  “Well, neither a ghost nor any books I can’t live without,” I said, skating past her comment as best I could. “What about you, anything you can’t live without?”

  “Other than yourself, nothing,” she said.

  With that we left the Armory. No further sighting of my accuser, my extortionist. As we strolled
back downtown along stately Park Avenue and scruffy lower Broadway, the faltering promise of freedom, if only I could square things away with Slader, seemed at once near and far. I knew that, just as one cannot force a flower to blossom by pulling on its petals, I had to be patient, bide my time, and hold out hope that my fragile dream would come to pass.

  KENMARE IT WAS. The village where we got engaged, the magical locus where we felt the happiest. We let a small cottage, not far from the lodge where we had stayed, on a vigorous creek punctuated by muscular bantam waterfalls and populated by salmon and trout that flashed in the morning light when they leapt. Although English was spoken here in the southern part of the country, as in most every part of Ireland except for little pockets known as Gaeltacht areas, we studied Gaelic together, a language that more than rivaled German for its crazy polysyllabics and unpronounceable pile-ups of consonants, and made day trips to Dingle to converse with locals. We made a few friends, not many, but all of them good-hearted folk who had grown up in County Kerry and wisely never left. We hiked MacGillycuddy’s Reeks; we loved taking the ferry out to the Skellig isles where monks once lived in utter austerity, cut off from the outside world like the pillar saints of old, atop their barren rocks hundreds of feet above the gnawing ocean. Our days were filled with simple tasks—sweeping the kitchen, shopping at the market for dinner, reading and writing, breathing, being.

  One midsummer day we shared a paper bag lunch of black bread, olives, and local cheeses at one of our favorite places in all of Kenmare, an impressive neolithic stone circle known as the Shrubberies, a few minutes’ walk from the center of town. Despite being near the somewhat busy Cromwell’s Bridge and a stone’s throw from the village’s main streets, this ancient circle—egg-shaped, actually—of fifteen boulders, a baker’s dozen of them upright, centered by an impressive boulder burial, was utterly quiet. Birdsong, occasional respectful visitors speaking in low tones, the distant, whisper-soft white noise of unseen traffic, these were all that disturbed the otherwise sanctum-sanctorum hush of the place. In our self-taught crash course to learn as much about our adopted home as we could, Meghan and I discovered that the Irish name for Kenmare was An Neidín, which meant “the Little Nest.” Perfect, we thought, even before we came upon the Shrubberies which, to us, was a nest within a nest.