The Forgers

by Bradford Morrow

  Outside, the snowfall diminished to a few confetti-like flakes floating down toward the street before finally stopping altogether. A brilliant winter sun that made the granite and bricks on the building across from our place sparkle broke through the clouds like some kind of celebratory celestial event. I am not making any of this up.

  WHILE I NOW KNEW that my supposed Slader sighting was nothing more than a paranoid delusion, real enough to make me nervous and imaginary enough to make me unsettled, the fact that the police had brought him in for another round of interrogation truly angered me. My contentment and, much as I hated to admit it to myself, my safety were intertwined with his. Sure, I might once have been happy to see Henry Slader inconvenienced, messed with, disrupted in whatever possible way, but no longer. Leave the dog to his own devices and he would likely leave me to mine. So I found myself thinking, Why him? Why should Pollock bother with Slader, having to my knowledge not one substantial shard of evidence worthy of the word?

  What had Slader been asked? What had he said? Had my name come up? If so, in what context? Above all, were they looking past Slader in my direction? I figured he must not have implicated me because, if he had, wouldn’t the Montauk detective or some Irish proxy be at the cottage door to ask me a few questions as well? I had already been through a couple of long rounds of enquiry, very unpleasant to say the least. And though I wasn’t a student of jurisprudence I had to think there was something akin to a statute of limitations when it came to questioning people, especially those who have rotated off the suspect list long ago, concerning whom no new incriminating evidence had surfaced. Not that any of these questions or self-assuring answers allowed me to sleep at night. Bottom line was, if Slader could be brought in again, so could I be.

  Meghan noticed it before I did. “Your eyes,” she said. “Have you looked in the mirror recently? They look awful.”

  “That’s nice.”

  “No, don’t get me wrong,” she went on, her smile gentle. “I’m just worried that you seem so worried. You’ll have plenty of time for bags under your eyes when there’s a newborn in the house.”

  We were driving over to Kinsale for one of our foodie splurges, lunch at our favorite restaurant there, knowing that these forays of ours that dated back to the days when we were first together in New York, venturing on the subway to outer boroughs in search of the perfect hay-smoked duck wings or charred Korean octopus, were soon to become a pleasant memory. Infants neither like nor need hay-smoked duck wings.

  “Worried, me? About what?” I never excelled at impromptu disingenuousness, but what had me in a twist was not even slightly within Meghan’s purview and so she wasn’t the wiser.

  “About becoming a dad, of course,” she said.

  When Meghan said these words, our car flying along a narrow road overlooking the ocean a thousand feet below us, I caught my breath. Whether it was the concern in her voice or the bald simplicity of the statement itself, my future snapped into focus in a way it hadn’t since arriving here. The granite-hard fact of fatherhood had never before registered at quite the depth I felt just then. Here I was in this old BMW we bought secondhand, driving on my new side of the road, the left rather than the right—I’m one who can find a metaphor in an empty teapot—which symbolized an entire new way of journeying forth through life. My wife sat next to me, a lovely, sensitive woman who had, for reasons that occasionally eluded all reason, fallen in love with and married me. I needed to let all the dead and living that I had gone out of my way to leave behind me remain behind. I took that wise thought and in my mind folded it into an invisible origami in the shape of a holy book, a book to live by.

  The freedom I felt the rest of that day was revolutionary. Of course it would prove to be one of those fleeting life-is-but-a-dream moments. But it was as if a fever had broken. Sitting across from Meghan, indoors at the restaurant this time since the weather threatened rain and the purple and gray-green clouds raced each other across the sky, I felt I had never been more in love than that moment. Nor more at peace in years.

  “My mother would have liked you so much,” I said.

  “So you’ve told me before,” she replied. “I really wish I could have met her.”

  “When she died, I was too young to have had any kind of a mother-to-son talk about what kind of girl she hoped I would one day marry. But if I had to make that conversation up, I’d say you’d more than fulfill whatever hopes she might have had for me.”

  We drove back home in gusting rain, but if the sky had been a perfect cerulean blue, I wouldn’t have thought it any more beautiful. I slept that night like the proverbial log. Life moved along with unwonted ease for a few weeks following my little epiphany. I would like to think that a kind of maturity settled over me, a maturity my mother had always worn with such grace, and as often as not, my father, too. And Meghan, who by this time had just begun to show a little, fairly glowed, looking for all the world like some Dante Gabriel Rossetti painting.

  The certified letter that arrived just before Thanksgiving naturally made me jumpy. For obvious reasons, the mail and I would never be easy companions in the future, I who as a boy used to love it when the postman showed up, since as often as not he would be the bearer of rare books. I signed for it at the post office, although it was addressed to Meghan care of me. Studying the return address, I realized it wasn’t from any of my demons but from my wife’s old bookshop in the East Village. I hoped they hadn’t gone bankrupt, since Meghan still owned nearly a third of the business. When she opened the envelope that evening before dinner, we discovered that quite the opposite had transpired.

  “Looks like they’re offering to buy me out,” Meghan said, rereading the letter to make sure she correctly understood it.

  I asked, “And how do you feel about that?” though I thought I knew the answer already.

  “The timing is perfect, me being pregnant and all,” she said, almost imperceptibly wistful. “Why hang on to it, since our life is here now, so long as we can keep our papers up to date. Right?”

  She handed me the letter to read. Their offer was fair, as were the terms. Meghan, in any case, had remained part owner only in order to lighten the onus of their initial collective purchase. Bookshops were, are, and always shall be chancy, quixotic enterprises at best—easier to raise snow leopards in one’s living room than keep an independent bookstore afloat—and that her erstwhile gang had made a sufficient go of it to come up with the cash to buy her out made her proud.

  “I want to do this in person, sign the paperwork right there in old New York,” she said, while we worked side by side at the kitchen counter, preparing a mishmash midweek dinner of leftovers. “While I can still fly and get around easily. Plus, let’s have Thanksgiving there one last time, before the baby comes along.”

  Having made arrangements to be absent from our jobs and for the landlord to check on the cottage during our weeklong absence, we drove up to Shannon and caught a flight to JFK. Even though I had witnessed many a time the looming Manhattan skyline, that angular and pinnacled gray urban scape never resembled such an inert graveyard as it did to me during those minutes gazing out the taxi window as we neared the Midtown Tunnel. Meghan expressed great excitement to be back for a visit even though we had been away for only a little more than half a year. My excitement was counterfeit.

  That same evening we had dinner at an Italian restaurant near Union Square with the bookstore staff, its soon-to-be-full owners, and as the wine flowed and plates of calamari and fried zucchini appetizers appeared, my spirits rose along with the rest. For a couple of fine hours I lost track of the infernal dread I experienced when we landed. I hadn’t realized what a security blanket our secluded corner of County Kerry had become for me. Here, even surrounded by Meghan’s delightful and adoring “kids,” as she still fondly insisted on calling them even though a couple were her own age, I felt exposed, vulnerable, even naked. What made things worse was that I had—absolutely had—to hide any trepidations from my w
ife. If she asked, I would have no logical explanation for my foreboding.

  Feeling flush, especially with the newfound money that would come from the sale of the balance of shares in the bookstore, we stayed at an unusually nice hotel overlooking my old neighborhood of Gramercy Park. The contract was to be signed and check cut on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, executed at a lawyer’s office down near Battery Park, and with no other business to tend to, Meghan and I visited her shop—“my old baby all grown up,” she called it—one last time before shamelessly turning into holiday tourists. All those years we lived here, we had never visited the Statue of Liberty or the observation deck of the Empire State Building. We dined at La Grenouille and checked out the Central Park Zoo. Yes, I studied the faces in every crowd. Even aboard the old-timey Circle Line boat that circumnavigated Manhattan island down the Hudson, up the East and Harlem rivers, I found myself checking and rechecking my fellow passengers against the possibility that Slader or Pollock or anyone who struck me as suspiciously attentive might betray himself. But my Argus-eyed vigilance came to nothing, and Thanksgiving itself, which we spent in Providence at the invitation of Atticus and his family, promised the luxury of anonymity.

  During Thanksgiving dinner, my longtime friend and colleague did give me a bit of a fright when he asked if he could have a private word with me while the supper table was cleared and coffee was being brewed to accompany pumpkin and mincemeat pies. I followed him to his study at the back of the rambling Victorian house on the hill adjacent to Brown University that he shared with his wife and two teenage girls, apprehensive as a buck in headlights that some forgeries from my collection had been returned to him, questions asked. Was it possible his hair had grayed a little more since the last time I saw him?

  “I hate to put you to work on pilgrims’ day,” he said, pulling out a sheaf from the top drawer of an antique oak desk. “But I could use a pair of expert eyes, your expert eyes, on this thing I’ve been offered.”

  “No problem,” I said, more relieved than he would ever know. “What is it?”

  “I’m not sure whether you remember a Doyle story called ‘The Cardboard Box.’”

  Not only did I remember it but it happened to be one of my favorite of Conan Doyle’s works because it was so unutterably dark, grimmer by far than most Holmes adventures. From the vantage of modern social mores, it wasn’t such an unusual murder mystery. A spurned would-be lover, an adulterous wife, a violent alcoholic, a vengeful double homicide, physical mutilation, and Holmes in top form—what was there not to adore, was how I felt about it. The tale was published a little over a century ago, in 1893, on both sides of the ocean in the Strand Magazine and Harper’s Weekly. Yet its author—so it was surmised—decided to forbid what I considered his most forward-looking, psychologically and physically violent, yes, but true-to-life story from inclusion in the London edition of his collection that came out later that same year, The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes. He even went so far as to exclude any mention of the matter in his later volume Memories and Adventures.

  “A draft passage,” continued Atticus, “from Conan Doyle’s autobiography, also suppressed or discarded it seems, has been discovered”—he held up the sheaf—“in which he reasons, point by point, why the story had to be omitted from Memoirs. And—get this—he adds some choice thoughts about his American publisher, Harper, who as you probably know didn’t get the memo, if there ever was one, about the cut—which, it appears, pissed him off in the extreme. Doyle scholars out there have never been able to document definitively why he got cold feet about that story. Sure, people have had their theories going back for years. This,” and now he extended the nondescript manila folder to me, “changes all that.”

  I did know the tale, both the fiction and nonfiction one, very well. It had interested my father, to be sure. If ever he had been offered what I thought Atticus Moore just handed me, I hadn’t a doubt but that he would have bought it at all costs and considered the fallout later. The fallout being, of course, the strong possibility of sophisticated hijinks.

  “I remember they had to withdraw the first American edition,” I said, “and reissue it with just the eleven stories, with ‘Cardboard Box’ pulled out. My dad cherished his copy of the suppressed first.”

  “Damn rare book, no wonder he did. I have to confess it was one of the very first volumes that flew off the shelf when I bought your father’s collection. It’s safely tucked away in a special collections library now.” He saw the incipient look on my face and cautioned, “Don’t ask.”

  “Can I ask where you got this?”

  Atticus laughed. “Still truffling for my sources, even though you’re out of the business?”

  “Just curious is all.”

  “Well, you remember that scout named Henry Slader? The one you asked me about a while back?”

  “Sure,” I said, noncommital.

  “I got this from a guy who, after working on him for a while, coughed it up that he had bought it from Slader.”

  My first thought was, as might be imagined, Slader forged the pages that constituted a private record, revealing at last Doyle’s concerns about the story, its illicitness and strong insights into venal sin, immorality in the first degree. But after I sat down at Atticus’s desk, asking “Do you mind?,” and began studying Doyle’s words—he was frank in his assessment that the tale was inappropriate for some readers, more sinister than the Sherlockian brand readily permitted—I found myself flummoxed, distressed even. Not so much because if this were authentic it would constitute the holy grail for any scholar interested in pinning down the author’s rationale behind suppressing “The Cardboard Box” from Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, would provide convincing written proof of what many critics over the years had been forced to theorize, and that was the simple fact the author got cold feet about the grisly tale of faithlessness and murder he had set down on paper. No, what upset me was that Doyle’s handwriting was perfect in every downstroke and pressure point, correct in every lift off of the nib and resetting on the paper. Above all, and far harder to fake, these sentences sounded like no one but the author himself.

  “Well,” Atticus asked, impatient. “Tell me. What do you think?”

  “How much are they asking?”

  He told me the number, in the thirty thousand range.

  “Offer twenty and see what happens.”

  “But you still haven’t told me what you think of the document itself. Is it real?”

  “It’s real enough. I’m holding it in my hands.”

  “Damn it, is it a forgery?”

  For the first time ever—not the first time in a long time or the first time in a while—I hadn’t a firm, objective answer to my friend’s question. If Slader had crafted this, his skills as a forger were nearing mastery, or had fully arrived, I had to admit, and gone were the days of lesser works. If he hadn’t, and this was truly an original, Atticus had himself a gold mine here. Either way, fake or not, I was deeply impressed. “If it is, it’s the most perfect and interesting forgery I’ve ever seen. I’ll tell you what’s more. If I were still in the practice, I would be dying of jealousy over the quality of this work. It is pure as spring water.”

  Atticus was understandably frustrated by my assessment, I saw, and because we had been colleagues for so long and I had pulled the wool, in that unfortunate phrase, over his eyes on far more than one occasion, I settled on what to my mind was the truth of the matter. Or, truth enough.

  “In my opinion, it’s genuine,” I said. “Congratulations, old pal. Looks like you have a lot to be thankful for this Thanksgiving.”

  He shook my hand, just a fraction of bemusement or concern or awe in his eye, I couldn’t tell which, if any, and without having given it any forethought whatever, I asked, “You remember that remarkable cache of Doyle letters about The Hound of the Baskervilles you sold me a while back?”

  “How could I forget? You got away with murder on that deal. One of the few things you hung on to when you
moved over to Ireland.”

  “Well,” I pressed ahead, “with the baby coming and seeing that you have this amazing find, maybe it’s time I let it go. You want it back for the same I paid for it?”

  I must admit that I myself was taken aback by the audacity of this impromptu idea. What was I thinking? Especially in light of the fact that two sets of these letters existed. But, I quickly reasoned, my set was more valid than Slader’s because my forgery was superior. If Slader were ever to bring his on the market, it would be decried as a fake. A fake likely copied from my supposed original. The irony was exquisite.

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’m not a collector any more. What use is it to me to keep it? Let somebody else enjoy it.”

  “I can pay you a little more than you paid me, fair enough?”

  “Nope. I’ll take back exactly what I gave you and we can call it a day,” I said. “I’ll overnight it to you when we’re back in Kenmare.”

  We shook hands on the deal and returned to the dining room, where our wives and his daughters—both of whom were champing at the bit to go to their respective boyfriends’ family homes for dessert—awaited us.

  “Big summit back there,” said Meghan. “I hope nothing that will land either of you in trouble.”

  “Not him,” Atticus said at the same time I said, “Not him.”

  “Well, that’s a good start.”

  We sat down to our coffee and delicious homemade pies, along with some excellent cognac, before catching the late train back to New York.

  Not surprisingly, on the ride down the darkened coast I obsessed over the documents I had seen in Atticus’s study. Meghan nodded off, her head resting heavily against my shoulder, while I shut my eyes in order to visualize, with what memory was left to me in my middling years, Slader’s—or, rather, Doyle’s—diary. It was an exceptional find, if a find it was, and promised to fill in an intriguing lacuna in the Conan Doyle biography. I admired the thing, false or true, real or not.