The Ross Forgery

by William H Hallahan

  Column B If It Succeeded: Pro—to have brought it off. What a great (albeit secret) tribute to his own skill as a literary expert. To have fooled the very best brains. A great sport, a three-day wonder. Such self-preening satisfaction. But Column A: No road back. No way to step forth and reveal the brilliance of the hoax, to gather scattered applause and walk away, integrity still intact. No. To commit the crime, he must be branded a criminal most particularly, in his own mind. Criminal.

  Townsend walked over and examined the overly muscled wharf cat, Henry Fielding. He had moved in, one summer morning, and set up digs behind the large fish tank, permanently fascinated by the slow undulations of the angelfish.

  Henry Fielding. The cat slept, wearing the tape over his seventeen stitches at a raffish angle. Even half dead, he managed the theatrical touch, the sexy bandage, seeming to play a scene from a war movie.

  Henry Fielding opened one eye and cocked it at him. Like a setting sun, the eye rolled downward as the lid slowly descended. The drugged cat drifted off again.

  There was something of Ross in that cat. Something in the personality that refused to be awed by the passing royal cavalcade. Something of the opportunist. Something, too, of what Ross called the broken hockey stick.

  Ross had no commitment to the literary world. He was an outsider. A skilled craftsman. An artist, even, with type. But not an acolyte, not a man-of-the-cloth of the written word. Literature was just another fertile field. And O’Kane was a user. A businessman, a Midas seeking to turn everything into gold.

  But he, Townsend. This was his turf, this literature stuff. This was his subject, his religion. And he was betraying it in a way that Ross wouldn’t understand—and certainly, not O’Kane.

  Ah, yes, but one thing. How perverse. If the piece were exposed, if it failed to fool the experts—much as he regretted having created it, much as he might be delighted to find his little crime exposed before it could become a permanent fraud, much as he hoped that it would fail—if it did, yes, if it did, his pride would be hurt.

  His ego, ambivalently, would suffer a defeat.

  For the first time, he began to understand the paralysis of Hamlet.

  Townsend’s eye came to rest on a photograph of James Joyce, an eye patch and black band making him out to be piratical, raffish, a member of Henry Fielding’s gang.

  In shame, Townsend walked over and turned James Joyce’s picture to the wall.

  4

  The wind in the dark alley was particularly strong.

  As the two men turned into it, one of them clapped his hand over the crown of his hat. “Goddamned wind is not getting this hat.”

  “You should have tied a red ribbon around that other one, Tatzie. Nice big bow under the chin. You’d never have lost it.”

  “Hilarious. Really hilarious.” Tatzie walked carefully down the alley, holding the brim of the hat with his hand. “What floor did you say?”

  “Second, third, and fourth.”

  Tatzie looked up at the windows of the rear wall of the building. He shook his head. “Nah, You’d have to be a human fly to go up them walls. Come on, Junior. We’ll do it my way.” He started back along the alley to the street. “Dumbest job I’ve ever been on.”

  Junior followed him, squinting sourly up at the building.

  At the edge of the building, Tatzie stopped abruptly, then stepped forward. “Holy God. For a moment I thought that was Rudemeyr sitting in that car.”

  Junior looked at the car parked at the curb. He squinted at the face of the man sitting behind the wheel. He shook his head. “Lay you eight to five odds that Rudemeyr’s in the river with a hole in his head.”

  Tatzie made a wry face. “Funny how he just disappeared like that, car and all. Maybe he took off somewheres.”

  The other man shook his head. “Not a chance. I know that cuckoobird. Somebody got him going through that window. Put him away.”

  The two of them went through the front entrance to the building, crossed the lobby and stepped into an elevator.

  “We’ll see how good our luck is tonight,” said Tatzie.

  They got off at the second floor and walked down the hall to a doorway: HADDON LABORATORIES—RECEPTIONIST.

  Tatzie turned the knob and the door opened. He nodded happily to the other. “Cleaning people.” He walked into the reception area and gazed around, then walked over to a closet.

  “You and me, we just become two scientists working late, Junior. Here.” He pulled two white laboratory jackets from their hangers and handed one to the other man.

  Junior took the jacket. “Just tell me one thing, Tatzie, OK?”

  “What?”

  “What are we looking for?”

  “How do I know?”

  5

  On Tuesday at 10 A.M., the ferry boat Verrazano trundled out of its slip in Battery Park and slid toward Staten Island. Near Governor’s Island, something in the bay water’s surface drew gulls, and they filled the air there like windblown sheets of newspaper.

  Ross watched them. And envied them. He’d had no sleep all night. No rest. And still twenty-seven hours to go.

  One way or the other, win or lose, his life could never be the same. If yes, he was stocked with seed potatoes for the rest of his life, and he’d leave with never a backward glance at his type shop. If no—oh, Christ, not no!—if no, he was out. But he couldn’t go back to setting type for the nosepickers. He’d dreamed dreams he’d never dared dream before. A chill wind was blowing, a wind that began at forty. At forty for him, anyway. Oh—to be forty and not to have it made. Time’s a-flying.

  Ross strolled across the deck of the ferry and looked at Ellis Island, where his grandfather had entered the country in 1904. Abandoned. Boarded up.

  He considered a bad outcome. What to do? Face up to it. What to do? Find another way to make a bundle. Rob a bank. Pass a note over the counter to the teller. He could see the catatonic terror on the woman’s face. Fear of death in her eyes. And him with a sick feeling of terror in his gut, expecting an alarm to go off, a bullet in the neck, a squad of clubswinging police. And then, forever on the dodge, never knowing when he’d get the tap on the shoulder and, turning, find a pair of handcuffs on his wrists. “Wanted for bank robbery. This man is armed and considered dangerous. Anyone knowing the whereabouts of this man should contact …” No no no no no.

  This pamphlet had to work. He saw himself in that stumblebums’ bar over by the Manhattan Bridge: A Shot of Booze and a Mug of Beer—One Buck. Wandering in with cuff edge of his pants rolled from scuffing on the sidewalk, rundown heels, three-day beard, and in his hand, God have mercy, a dollar. A whole dollar. Smooth it out there on the bar, Ross, in the puddles of beer and booze and melted ice. Smoothing it out joyfully for the barman to see. See? Shot and a beer, please. Then another? Yes. Getting another dollar and another drink and yet another—and then the growl, the swing of the fist, and the panic is on. Cops. Spinning red lights, uninterested passersby. There he was—behold! In the Tombs, in the drunk tank; the unbelievable stench of puke, slept-off booze, filthy bodies, sick bodies; eyes in red sauce, swimming back and forth like goldfish imprisoned in miniature goldfish bowls; eyes glancing at doors, waiting to be sprung, to go back and get the hair of the dog. God help me, I need a drink. A dollar. A whole dollar. My face. It’s been kicked, bitten, chewed, and smashed to a pulp. And my teeth are broken. Worked over by the barman, then finished off by the fathanded, bum-weary, frustrated Bowery cop.

  Ross. An inflamed carbuncle on society’s rump. Causing trouble, unhappy, and making everyone else unhappy. Today he didn’t dare dream of that shop in Switzerland.

  If I can’t design type, I don’t want to live.

  He looked down on the bay waters that flowed, ebbing, toward the Narrows under the Verrazano Bridge. It occurred to him that he’d become a very despicable human being.

  He considered jumping into the water.

  6

  On Tuesday, at 1:15 P.M., Ross stopped short in the middle
of the sidewalk. In a trance, almost.

  He was across the street from Haddon Laboratories. How had he come here? Walking. Walking aimlessly. Furiously. He looked up at the windows. In there, being processed like a corpse taken by grappling hooks under a pier, was the pamphlet. A literary autopsy. He turned away urgently, as from a forbidden subject. Hurry up, clock.

  7

  At 2:15 P.M., Ross approached O’Kane’s bar. There was the cat in the huge white china bowl, spread out like a voluptuary, on her back, her furry belly obscenely exposed to the sun and any passersby. Sleeping.

  Ross paused. There on the sidewalk, gazing up at her, bandage set at its raffish angle, sat the muscular Henry Fielding, the breeze lifting a strip of fur along his backbone. Unhappily, he licked his chops and gazed at Ross.

  The bartender set up a beer. And Ross sipped it. He looked at the elderly clock, ticking with mortal slowness like a skinny, doddering old lady. Slowly, slowly ticking. Taking a week to toothlessly chew through one day.

  Ross wished he could knock himself out with a bat until one o’clock the next day.

  8

  In the doorway, out of the wind, the sun felt warm on Tank’s face. He watched the cat with the bandage around its head sit staring at the cat in the white bowl of the window.

  Tank hated cats.

  The sun was Tank’s only comfort in recent days, tailing the prowling Ross. Tank was sick of drafty subways, windy ferries, and endless, windblown streets.

  He unfolded the course text and began to read. Just above the top of the page, he could see Ross, drinking a beer.

  Lesson Six. Crimes Against Property (continued) Section 1. Forgery. The private investigator, because he lives in the world of documents, letters, wills, checks, and credit cards, must be familiar with the crime of forgery.

  Definition: To create or to alter or to mark any piece of writing for private profit or the deception of another is a crime called forgery.

  Copying another’s name on a document or a check is clear-cut forgery. “Kiting” or “raising” a check by increasing the original amount through the addition of digits is a forgery. Changing a date is a forgery. Using a ficticious name or an alias is a forgery. Even if you have the same name as another person, signing a document and passing it as having come from the person who shares your name is a forgery.

  Issuing a forgery is known as “uttering” a forgery. Forgery questions can become very sophisticated and complex, especially in the arts.

  Two of the most famous forgers in history never wrote anything. A Dutch painter named van Meegeren was arrested by Dutch authorities after World War II as a collaborator with the enemy. He was charged with treason for obtaining an original Vermeer painting for the Nazi, Hermann Goering. In order to save himself from the crime of being a traitor, he confessed that he forged the painting himself. To prove it, he created a new Vermeer in his jail cell and used a secret aging process he had invented. The art world was truly shocked, for it turned out that a number of other Vermeers hanging in museums were also van Meegeren forgeries.

  In the literary world, Thomas Wise of London printed about fifty first editions in the 1880s and 1890s, only to have them exposed shortly before his death in 1937.

  In fact, forgeries exist in every one of the arts, but these require the aid of specialists and are not properly the concern of the practicing private investigator.

  Ross exited from the bar, and Tank stepped out of the snug doorway to follow him.

  The bone-biting wind began to seethe down his collar once again.

  9

  At 4:35, Service entered Emmett O’Kane’s office and splashed some Scotch on an ice cube. He swirled the liquid in the glass and sniffed it. Then he stood before a wall of glass and looked down Manhattan Island spread before him in fading light.

  “Do I detect a certain restlessness?” asked Emmett O’Kane.

  Service turned and smiled at him, looking like a whiskey ad.

  “Soon enough,” said O’Kane, “soon enough.”

  Service nodded. “It’s like waiting for Christmas.” He sat down on the arm of a chair and toasted the view of Manhattan. “To the zoo and all its denizens.”

  O’Kane shrugged. “If not this, then something else. Sooner or later, we’ll get him.”

  “I can’t wait for later.” Service studied the skyline. Dusk was at hand, and lights were appearing. “You know, it’s ironic that they selected Stevenson. When I was a very young lad, my mother’s brother packed me off to boarding school in Scotland. I detested it. And I detested him. Uncle Archie. God, what a bust he was. A real darb. And there I was, in this organized famine passing for a boarding school. That’s when I discovered Stevenson. In fact, I discovered Kidnapped. You recall the story? Well, I’ll give you a précis of a segment. The boy goes to his uncle—Scottish uncle, mind you—who lives in this tumbledown castle. And the uncle is a near, tightfisted, mean-spirited, miserly old whoreson. He obviously doesn’t want the boy around. During the evening, a terrible storm arises, and in the midst of it, he sends the boy to bed upstairs —up this winding stone stairway. A bolt of lightning shows the boy at the very last second that the stairs are broken. If the lightning hadn’t shown him, he would have stepped off in the darkness to his death.”

  Service stood up and looked at O’Kane. “You have no idea how I hated that uncle. He was very similar to my Uncle Archie, and I identified the two. Naturally, I identified with the boy. In all my adult years, I have never found any character, real or imaginary, that I’ve hated as much as that uncle of Stevenson’s.”

  “Until Pickett.”

  “Precisely! Until Pickett!” He shook his head. “Stupid little piece of printed matter. It’ll be more important to him than the billions of dollars and the thousands of people he controls.”

  “If it passes the lab tests.”

  Service slopped some more Scotch on the dwindled ice cube. “And that depends on the skill of Townsend. Frankly, I’m still amazed at his decision to make the forgery. It weakens my faith in human nature still more. I was sure he’d never do it if we approached him directly. I was even doubtful that the approach through Ross would work. Maybe Ross is a better salesman than we believed. And now I’m wondering if we wouldn’t have done just as well with a direct approach to Townsend.” He shrugged. “Well, it’s in the lab. And we’ll know just how good Townsend is in—” he looked at his watch, “—twenty hours and two or three minutes.”

  “Well, don’t feel so miffed, Service. Your choice of Ross was a stroke of true genius.” O’Kane opened a folder and riffled some papers. He extracted one and read a sentence aloud. “‘An extremely unhappy man who has the capacity to make other men unhappy.’ And that seems to be the key that unlocked Townsend.”

  “The most manipulable type on earth, that Ross—the idealist who goes sour. Pickled in his own self-pity.”

  “Temperamental bastard,” said O’Kane. He arose and poured himself a Scotch highball. “I have a strong desire to rattle his snotty teeth.”

  “Rattle away,” said Service. “After one o’clock tomorrow.”

  10

  The wind had shifted. Before dawn, Wednesday, it was out of the northwest again, spilling frigid air down the Hudson Valley. Spring was still far away.

  At seven, the first drops of rain struck. By seven-thirty, the entire eastern seaboard was involved in a steady, cold rain and a remorseless breeze.

  11

  Ross shaved impatiently. The rain rilled down his window glass.

  He sloshed his razor in the hot water furiously, scraped several cheek strokes, and sloshed it again. When he’d finished, he pressed a steaming hot facecloth on his face and let the soothing heat penetrate.

  He sat down on the lid of the toilet and took a deep breath. He had to get a grip on himself. Win or lose. He needed no preparation if it passed all the tests. If it didn’t, he knew he was in for a very bad fall. The suspense was almost unendurable.

  He looked out at the Ma
rch deluge. There’d be no long, aimless walk today. If only he could get some sleep. Two nights. He felt disoriented.

  12

  At 10 A.M., Michael Townsend stooped over the water cooler in the school corridor. He’d become so ambivalent that he couldn’t decide whether he wanted success or failure.

  If he failed, he promised himself he would never again make that mistake. If he succeeded, London beckoned.

  He shrugged. Comme ci, comme ça.

  He hoped it would fail. And his premonitions told him it would.

  13

  At noon, the weather bureau issued a flash flood alert, with rain, heavy and wind-driven, to continue all day and through the night.

  Emmett O’Kane stood in his glass-walled office and looked out on the vast storm. The bottom of Manhattan disappeared in the gray miasma. The upper floors of the tallest buildings were invisible in clouds and mist. Great puffs and curtains of rain fell, and lights were on all over the city. The Hudson River was a barely visible glacier of gray.

  O’Kane looked up as Service entered. “Booties, brollies, and Barracudas,” he said. “Time to go.”

  O’Kane turned away from the window and walked toward the door.

  14

  O’Kane was there at twenty minutes to one.

  He sat in the same booth, a front row seat to the rainstorm through weeping windows. And he waited. As before. He sat, composed but alert as a watch spring, relaxed, yet slowly drumming his fingers to the eternal beat of the pendulum clock.

  The bar was doing a brisk business with a group of construction workers from a nearby building. They stood talking loudly, laughing and watching the rain.