The Ross Forgery

by William H Hallahan

  A moment later, Miss Amalie Dodgson died in her bed.

  7

  Arthur Tank checked the dumdum.

  Tank sat on the slippery wooden seat of the ferry and checked Ross’s stance. Back and forth on the ferry. Nickel a ride to Staten Island. And a nickel back to the Battery. Back and forth all day since morning.

  The dumdum stood just inside the glass sliding door looking out over New York Harbor at the fast-approaching Battery. A powerful wind had touched up the harbor water with white caps and was driving a lapping parade of small breakers against Governor’s Island.

  Bald head, no hat, and a wind blowing half a gale. Dumdum. He had a hunch the dumdum would get off the ferry this time and head back uptown.

  Arthur Tank returned to Lesson Three, Chamber’s International Course on Private Investigation: Surveillance. Section 8: Following the Unsuspecting Target.

  Tank read with attention, shaping each word with his lips.

  8

  Sunlight lay briefly in the cobblestone lane of the mews.

  Edgar Ross looked up at the sky as he walked, studying the flotillas of clouds that moved rapidly across the strips of blue between buildings.

  At his shop door, he noted with bitterness the lettering he’d done so carefully by hand. Such great expectations:

  EDGAR ROSS, Typographic Designer

  Custom-designed Typefaces

  Hand-set Type

  Antique Fonts

  Phototypography

  He stood for a moment just inside the door, looking at the furniture and impedimenta of his life, the old wooden font boxes, the chases, the hellboxes, and the two new IBM phototypesetting machines. His wife operated one and Kitty Fitzgerald the other. Neither looked up.

  In the separate glassed-in office, in shadow, stood his drawing board and taboret, the center of the world from which were to have issued an awesome parade of new typefaces.

  The wind whined at the keyhole of the shop door.

  His wife looked up from one of the phototypesetters without speaking, and he felt her watching him cross the shop and mount the carpeted stairs. He got a can of beer from the refrigerator and drained half of it in a few gulps.

  He saluted the air with the beer can. “Slainte. ”

  His wife mounted the steps.

  “Well, if it isn’t the former Helen Seferis, lovely daughter of Odysseus Seferis, throne rocker of the County of Kings, Borough of Brooklyn.”

  “You’ve been very busy.”

  “Yes. I have. And I’m going right back out again.”

  “I thought I saw that man Tank at the end of the alley. You must have had a good time. The last time he came around here, you owed him six hundred dollars.”

  “Yes. A good time. I dropped five big ones.”

  She stared at him. “Five—hundred? Dollars?”

  “More. Five big, big ones.”

  Astonished, she watched him drain the can. Then she shook her head unhappily. “It was a lot more fun when your obsession was type design, not money.”

  “It’s not money! It’s freedom! Freedom to design the face I want to design without the grubby little hands of every two-bit art director in the city butchering it. I’m forty years old and I haven’t made it yet!”

  “You’ve got it made! Your plate’s full, Edgar. We have our own business and you’ve designed hundreds of faces—”

  “Nothing big! The big chance never came. I want what Baskerville had. A fortune and the time to make his own typefaces and even print them on his own presses.”

  “The time you spent losing five thousand dollars could have been spent designing a typeface.”

  “Ah, Helen, you’ll never understand.”

  “OK. I understand one thing. To pay off that five thousand-dollar gambling debt, you’re going to have to set all the classified type, all the footnotes and matchbook covers and two-point flyspecks in the city. The Great Garlic Breath you hate so much is going to own you night and day for months and months.”

  Up the stairwell rose the sound of Kitty Fitzgerald typing on the typesetting machine.

  “All I want is one big hit. A big number. Then we can get out of here—go live in Switzerland, where they really appreciate type.”

  She lowered her eyes and sighed. “If you can’t make it in New York, Edgar, you can’t make it anywhere.”

  He crumpled the beer can and pitched it into a wastebasket. “I’m going to make it, and I’m going to make it in New York to the tune of one hundred grand.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “A guy named Emmett O’Kane gave me a commission for one hundred grand.”

  “What for?”

  “For a literary masterpiece.”

  She frowned at him.

  “You don’t believe me?”

  “No. And I have work to do. And Kitty has that other type job nearly done.”

  But Ross was staring out of the window.

  Helen Ross started back down the steps, then paused. “Emmett O’Kane? You mean the Emmett O’Kane?”

  “What’s that mean?” He watched her step into the living room. She sorted through a small pile of magazines and pulled out one. “Here.”

  A weekly news magazine cover. A montage. O’Kane’s golden good looks in profile, facing a button-eyed old man with a saturnine mouth and a long rubber nose. “Emmett O’Kane versus Thomas Long Pickett: The Battle of the Decade.”

  Ross looked at the clock. It was two-thirty. Townsend would be home around three-thirty.

  Townsend. The only one in the whole country who might be able to do it. But what a selling job he was going to have to do on Townsend. Three-thirty.

  Ross opened the magazine to the cover story.

  THREE

  1

  At the dark turning of the stairs above him, Ross could see the figure of a man.

  “Who’s there?”

  “Me. Ross.”

  “Oh.”

  “Oh, my foot.” Ross began to mount the softly carpeted stairs. “What time is it?”

  “It’s just after three-thirty.”

  Ross put his hand out. “Hi.”

  “Yeah. What can I do for you?”

  “First of all, Mickey-cakes, you can invite me in and give me a cup of coffee. That wind out there is colder than a witch’s nose.” He smirked at Michael Townsend’s face and stepped past him into the apartment. “I’ve got a proposition for you that will set you up for the rest of your life.”

  “Seems to me we read through this same script a while back.” Michael Townsend followed Ross into the apartment. Bright sunlight filled it, and Ross shook his head as he turned and surveyed the familiar furnishings.

  “Samuel Pepys’s London,” he murmured, looking at the map over the fireplace. He glanced at the crowded bookshelves that ascended to the high ceilings. He flicked an eye at the microscope by the window, the tank of tropical fish, and, on the windowsill, the cat, Henry Fielding. He looked over at the closeted pullman kitchen. “How about the coffee?”

  Townsend snorted. “You weren’t kidding. OK. Coffee it is.”

  Ross strolled over to the large desk and looked at Townsend’s partially opened mail. He glanced at a letter from a London bookseller offering Restoration books for sale, plus a broken lot offering of seventeenth-century Flemish books. “You still getting mail from that Van Nostrand, in London?”

  “Sure.” Michael Townsend opened the folding doors of the wall kitchen and hunted for his coffeepot in a closet. “Someday, I’ll buy everything on his price list.”

  “Yep, and someday cows will give beer.” He picked up a padded book bag and glanced at the address: Michael Townsend, English Department, St. David’s Academy for Young Men. “Blue blazers,” he murmured, “striped rep tie, and dirty fingernails.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. How’s school?”

  “OK.” Townsend spooned ground coffee into the metal basket of the coffeepot. “Fine.”

  “When do you leave
for Europe?”

  “Day after school ends. Nighttime flight from Kennedy. June 15. That’s exactly fifteen weeks from today.”

  “And then back here, the day before Labor Day?”

  “Yep.”

  “How’d you like to stay there?”

  “Where?”

  “In London. For a year. Or two years. Indefinitely.”

  “Oh, I see. Let me guess. Is this the typesetter’s sales job? Overnight service to London from Ross’s type shop in New York. Or is this the faithful reproductions of eighteenth century printing equipment, including wooden fonts? No? Let me guess again.”

  “OK, OK. That’s all past history. This is a cash-in-your-hands deal. Right here in New York. You don’t have to quit your job at the school. Part-time, after hours.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. All you have to do is help me design an historically accurate facsimile.”

  “Ah-ha.”

  “No, no. Don’t get the wrong impression, Townsend. This is perfectly legitimate. A deal with real money right on the table.”

  “OK. An historically accurate facsimile. What’s that mean?”

  “A topnotch facsimile.”

  “A topnotch facsimile.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Of what?”

  “Of a small brochure, a little masterpiece. And I’ll take care of the typography.”

  “And I get enough to go to London for a sabbatical of a year or two?”

  “Yeah. Listen. It’s as simple as—you ever hear of a guy named Wise?”

  “Wise?”

  “A literary—a bibliophile—Ashley Library—English.”

  Townsend nodded. “Thomas Wise, the forger.”

  “Yeah. Him. Wise.”

  “So?”

  “A facsimile of one of his pamphlets.”

  “Facsimile. A historically accurate facsimile of a Wise forgery.”

  “Well, not exactly. But close enough.”

  “A forgery of a forgery?”

  “Yeah.”

  “No.”

  “What!”

  “Go home, Ross. Get the hell out of here.”

  “What the hell’s the matter?”

  “Oh, Jesus. Are we playing games now?”

  “No. I’m not asking you to do something illegal.”

  “You’re not, huh?”

  “A facsimile is what I want. This very rich crackpot wants an accurate facsimile of one of Wise’s—ah—forgeries.”

  “What for?”

  “Not to sell. Not to fool the public. He just wants to get one guy mad. A competitive collector. He wants to drive him right around the bend with jealousy. He wants this guy to think he’s got the real thing.”

  “Go home, Ross.”

  “Jesus. Will you listen?”

  “No. I don’t want to listen. Go home.”

  “What are you going to do? Rot your life out here, fingering those rare book lists and dreaming over kid’s compositions on ‘My Dog Spot,’ teaching spoiled rich kids how to get richer while the thing you really want to do sits undone on a shelf there? Think what two years in London could do for you—you could rack off two, three books that would make you, with your microscope, one of the world’s leading lights on books and bookmaking, a bibliographic sleuth of the first water. A bookman with royalty checks coming in each month, honorariums, and consulting fees and articles in professional journals. The whole thing would open up for you like a can of meatballs if you had two years in London.”

  “Come on, come on, Ross.”

  “Listen, dummy, I’m talking fifty thousand dollars!”

  “Fifty thousand dollars?”

  “Yep.”

  “You have to be out of your mind. Fifty thousand dollars to make someone jealous? Go home, Ross. You’ve walked into a rat’s nest.”

  “Listen, Mike, will you? This isn’t a literary forgery. We’re trying to fake something—ah—something fake.” Ross chuckled at the phrase. “Wait. Wait. Look. This has nothing to do with your precious literature or any important work. It’s just another one of Wise’s many forgeries. And you know damned well those forgeries only matter to a couple of rich screwball collectors. They might as well be collecting cigar bands or gum cards. Listen, dummy, while those horse’s asses sit around collecting counterfeits with money they don’t know what to do with, you sit here with important literary work to be done, all bogged down for lack of money. It doesn’t make any sense. Money that could be spent on you, so you can make major literary finds, is being spent collecting a bunch of literary trash created by a forger—stuff that should have been burned. What the hell would another Wise forgery mean to the real literary world?”

  “Stop, stop, stop. I don’t need this. I don’t want anything to do with it.”

  “Fifty grand! Fifty thousand dollars! Townsend, this could be a big hit—a triple play for both of us. You could be set up for life. Life, Mickey, life! Think about that.”

  Townsend looked at him with lidded eyes. “Life sounds more like a jail term.”

  “Oh, come on. Who’s going to catch us? There aren’t a half dozen people in the whole country who can do this job. Look, if we do this right it’ll be authenticated by experts, and then no court in the world can convict us of a forgery. And if it lays an egg, the experts will condemn it as a fake. And in that case, a certain collector ends up with egg on his face for having bought a cat in a bag, and he won’t tell where he got it. See? Either way, we’re safe. Look Townsend, this is going to take brilliant work to bring off. It’ll take the right ink, the right paper, a microscopically accurate reproduction of a hybrid font of type, the right binding. Honest to God, Townsend, it’ll be one of the great masterpieces of graphic arts in this century.”

  Michael Townsend shook his head with a wry smile. “Ross, you were meant to be a snake oil pitchman with an Indian drum and a tent. Now get out of here.”

  “Look, dummy up! The man who wants to buy this piece is going to keep it forever. No one’s going to see it. It won’t circulate. And no one will ever trace it back to us. It’ll be listed as the real thing. Everyone will believe it is an authentic Wise forgery. You can’t be tried for a crime that wasn’t committed. I know we can do this. I know it. Look, Mickey. Suppose I came in here and counted out 250 one hundred dollar bills. Twenty-five whole grand. Right here. Right on this desk. Look.” He counted imaginary money. “One, two, three, four, five thousand, six thousand, seven thousand dollars, eight thousand, nine thousand real, real dollars, ten—”

  “Stop, stop.”

  “You’d be on the next plane to London, right? Gone! Over the fence! You wouldn’t think twice about those arrogant little rich bastards with all their privileges and doting daddies. You’d be on the six o’clock flight tonight. Tomorrow morning at nine you’d be examining John Milton manuscripts, Samuel Pepys’s diary in the original code—”

  “You had garlic for lunch.”

  Ross punched a fist into a palm and stood up, striding back and forth. “Look. Goddamn it. I mean, I gotta tell you. Haven’t you ever wanted to fly? Haven’t you ever wanted to be destiny’s tot? Never dreamed? Never wanted to—haven’t you ever wanted to start down at the Battery near the ferry slips and work your way straight up Manhattan, drinking every bar dry, and leaving the patrons wiped out and draped over the mashed-up lumber? Drinking and fighting way to hell and gone all the long way up to 242nd Street and Bronx Park, brimming to the scuppers with booze, bleeding from all knuckles? And then—oh, ho, Townsend, then to lie down. Merciful Jesus, so tired, to lie down on the sweet, wet grass in the park and sleep and sleep and sleep! It can’t be all nine to five with a clean shave and well-modulated voices! Didn’t you ever want to fly?”

  Townsend nodded at him. “Did you ever read a line of poetry that made the hair on your neck stand up?”

  “Don’t read it, Mickey-cakes, live it! Oh, Jesus Christ on a cross! Look, there’s nothing wrong with this! Nothing! You’re gulling a rich, avaricious fool
who should be shot on sight. Look around you, Townsend, for Christ’s sake! You’re a fool. An idiot. Loving books the way I love alphabets, keeping yourself pure as the grail for Lit-rat-choor. While all around you the Great Ape Society steals us blind, grabbing and getting while we stand with our thumbs in our mouths. Conning kids to buy cereal that has no nutrition, making tires that kill at sixty miles an hour. That’s real fraudulence! That’s immoral! Ersatz products that are forged to look real—products that hurt people. Fake packages that don’t deliver true value. That’s what a forgery is. Art with no nutrition. Is it immoral to gull a stupid businessman with a criminal mind? Look, I’ve tried the good-boy route. Now, the hell with it. I’m forty. Forty! Twilight is gathering.”

  “Twilight! At forty?”

  “Don’t laugh, damn it.”

  Townsend shook his head. “Twilight.”

  “Look, I’ve waited forty years, and I’m not waiting any longer. I’m going to do this thing and take the money and run. If you want in, come. If not, I’ll get someone else. This forgery is going to be made by someone and it might as well be you. You.”

  Townsend crossed his arms and looked out of the window.

  “Come on, Mickey. Don’t you think you can do it?” Ross watched his face. “What do you say—think maybe it’s beyond your abilities?”

  Townsend turned and looked at him.

  “Look, Townsend. Just help me make it. You’ll be anonymous. I’ll never, never tell a soul you did it. You are absolutely protected. Make it for me, and I’ll handle the peddling of it. You’re a completely silent partner. By God, Townsend, you have to be completely insane to pass this up. It can’t miss. Freedom, Mike, freedom.”

  “Go home.”

  “I can’t hear you.”

  “Home.”

  “Louder.”

  “I’m thinking.”

  2

  THOMAS J. WISE in the Original Cloth

  by W. Partington

  Robert Hale, Publisher, 1946