The Forgers Read online

  During this time, Meghan and I cocooned ourselves away from others, which allowed her, whose resilience profoundly impressed me, a chance to begin her process of healing. We did find ourselves inevitably returning to the subject of who might possibly have wanted to hurt Adam, slay him in such a way, with Meghan concluding there was a strong chance it was someone we didn’t even know.

  “He had his own life out in Montauk,” she said, with frustrated resignation. “Close as we were, there’s all kinds of things I’m sure he kept from his little sister.”

  I nodded, thinking, Truer words were never uttered.

  DYING IS A DANGEROUS BUSINESS. A liberation from suffering, a release from life’s problems, death is also an indictment. Once we’re dead, secrets that we so carefully nurtured, like so many black flowers in a veiled garden, are often brought out into the light where they can flourish. Cultivated by truth, fertilized by rumor, they blossom into florets and sprays that are toxic to those who would sniff their poisonous perfumes. While I did my best to shelter Meghan from certain unsavory discoveries that were made about her brother’s life—like many a sibling, she understandably didn’t want to believe he was anything other than an innocent victim—some damning details would soon enough vine their strangling way into the light. Details that, as fate would have it, I had already surmised about Adam but could not before his death practically or honorably reveal to her. Details that I myself was duty bound to help transit from that darkness of secrecy into truth’s awkward glare. Salt on the wound, I know, and yet it would prove to be an unavoidable seasoning.

  Now that I am on the subject of truth, it is important that I offer a confession. Or, rather, an illumination in order to bring into better focus Adam Diehl’s unfortunate death and by way of explaining how I knew what I knew, or believed I knew, about his hidden life.

  You see, like Adam, I myself was once a forger. Undeniably, and even unashamedly, triumphantly a forger. There was a time in my life when nothing gave me more joy than forging letters and manuscripts by my favorite writers. Nor was I some naif off the boat who was taken in and, if you will, pimped out by dealers who used my unique handiwork to make millions for themselves while I was left the breadcrumbs. No, I knew who I was and what I was doing. I learned the ropes and forged, ha, my path. And I adored my job. It is no exaggeration to state that the tremulous thrill that surged through me when I lowered my nib to virgin paper was the most erotic feeling I could possibly imagine, the most intoxicating, the most resplendent. The satisfaction of virtuosity put to the test was like none other, was what I lived for and what Diehl possibly strived for, too, though I suspect the gentle art of forgery never gave him the visceral stab of pleasure that it invariably gave me. When I conceived and penned the inscription of an esteemed master in a copy of his or her rarest book—sometimes to a family member, other times to a fellow novelist or poet—an edgy sublimity settled over the moment. It was like electric stardust, say, or a kind of aurora borealis of the mind. Truly, happiness beyond words.

  Part of what lay behind this unique feeling was the high-wire nature of the act itself. As a skilled craftsman, the forger has but one chance to get it just right, or else instead of making a book more desirable, more valuable, he has wrecked the thing. But when it is done expertly—and in my heyday I was nothing if not an expert, I think perhaps the finest expert at work during my transient time in the trade—heaven shone down and a choir of rebel angels sang. The rest was about the tense, satisfying pleasure of knowing something others might only try and fail to guess at. Whenever I sold my handiwork to an experienced bookseller for a considerable sum, I knew I had once again hoodwinked the world even as I had ironically made it a richer, more luminous place. I thought—rightly in the beginning, wrongly later—I could rest assured that my spurious inscribed books, my fake letters and manuscripts could travel the precincts of bibliographic connoisseurship with the perfect invisibility of the authentic, above reproach, for all intents and purposes real. Such refined beguilement was the alpha and omega of my art.

  For most of my adult life I was a man who was all about ink and paper and first editions. Vintage papers for early correspondence and holograph manuscripts, hand-mixed inks, irreproachable, for lavish inscriptions. Not words so much as letters, their connectors and flow, were what mattered most to me, at least in the beginning, back when I was starting out. Each letter required the right presence and pressure, the tender weight of ink, old sepia, faded black, on my small canvas. The ascenders, the descenders, the choreographic shape and spirit of a comma, these were what kept me up at night. The precision of a period. Single quotes like black crescent moons in a parchment sky. The adage has it, Do what you love. This was what I loved.

  Then I got caught. The industry—a small subculture where pebbles dropped in a pond can create tidal waves; a tribe of brilliant children—roiled for a while in the aftermath of my conviction. Perhaps “roiled” is too strong a word, a little egotistical of me to frame it in such a way. Still, as I was later told by a number of friends in the trade who, despite my downfall, would eventually remain friends, various perfectly authentic letters and signatures in all manner of first editions were suddenly suspect, and some dealers were as loath to buy as collectors. The same experts who before had bought my offerings with utmost confidence were now questioned by special collections librarians and others who wanted reappraisals of authenticity for works acquired during my admitted years of activity, especially when it came to authors that had been my specialty, Conan Doyle and Sherlockiana being at the top of that list. Parts of the autograph market briefly stalled, as markets do when doubt is injected into their body politic, but not for long, especially given what a comparatively small niche I had occupied.

  Whether it was because I was represented by a shrewd attorney, which I was, and a wise and respectable man to boot, or because this particular lily-white collar crime was one that the police and prosecutors didn’t take as seriously as other scams—it was far more sexy to bust an insider trading hedge fund bigwig than some fellow who could write an H. G. Wells postcard—I managed to get a good plea bargain. I had never been in trouble with the law before, didn’t have so much as a parking ticket in my record, and that naturally helped me, too. The fact that I hadn’t stolen anything, as such, further figured into my overall picture as a positive factor. After consulting with my lawyer, I confessed—no need for the bother of a trial—and was convicted and sentenced.

  In exchange for my full cooperation and in light of that prior clean record, punishment was limited to probation, a substantial fine, repayment plus interest to buyers, what seemed like endless hours of community service sweeping leaves and litter in city parks, and an agreement going forward to help the authorities identify forgeries like the ones I used to make with such aplomb. The pact I made with myself was that I would turn a new leaf. Many bridges had been burned, I knew, but rare book dealers, lest I depict them wrongly as a community of authorities that could be duped, are for the most part very sharp, honest, and thoughtful individuals. When asked by the police if I felt forgery was rampant in the trade, I told them no, that, with all modesty, it took someone of my caliber and sophistication to get past any of them. Lesser practitioners were inevitably shot out of the sky like low-flying birds. Not to brag, but it took a raptor like myself to clear the range of their canny buckshot, at least while my long flight lasted. Over time, to my great relief and even joy, a number of people forgave or forgot—I was always well liked in the industry and I insisted wherever and as often as I could that most of the books and manuscripts I handled were not forged, a courteous lie that no one could disprove—my reputation was slowly rehabilitated. I even did freelance work at one of the auction houses, vetting upcoming lots for possible impostors among the literary jewels that collectively brought millions in their rooms.

  So, yes, my dirty secret was exposed, my cherished affaire de coeur with pen and paper was over. I suffered as a result—and deservedly—but also strove
for and mostly attained my redemption, though of course there were some people in the trade who shunned me forever after.

  The posthumous revelations of Diehl’s secrets, on the other hand, so to say, left the man unshielded, and because of the tenuous dots that connected him and me via Meghan, I wasn’t overly surprised that the investigators called me back in. When they explained they wanted me, of all people, to have a look at some of the damaged books and manuscripts, I figured the exercise had as much to do with giving me yet another look as a possible suspect as it did with confirming or denying the items were forgeries or materials were forger’s tools. I showed up on time—confident but not overly confident, friendly but not suspiciously friendly—with the simple desire to give them the information they sought and be back home in New York that night in time for dinner with Meghan as usual.

  Did I recognize any of these items? they asked, handing me a tray and then others with dried blood- and ink-soaked documents in them opened to pertinently inscribed pages or leaves. Grateful I didn’t have to wear surgical gloves because I wasn’t asked to touch anything, I honestly answered, No. That is, for instance, I recognized that this was the first edition of Dickens’s American Notes published in London in 1842, both volumes sadly torn out of their bindings but with a contemporary inscription and Dickens’s characteristic Slinky of narrower and narrower squiggles beneath his signature looking plausibly correct. But did I recognize this specific volume? No.

  What would something like that be worth? they asked.

  In fine condition, as it might have been before the incident, and if the recipient here was a friend of the author—I couldn’t make out the name, I apologized—perhaps fifty to seventy-five.

  Dollars?

  Yes, well, thousand dollars I mean.

  I was puzzled when they asked me if I had ever heard of one Henry Slader, to whom Adam had been apparently paying monthly installments for some acquisition or another. Regarding him, I could only shrug. “Nothing unusual about installments,” I told them. Not being used to the high prices rare books often traded for, they expressed particular interest in the fact that thousands of dollars were in play here.

  “Nothing unusual about the money, either,” I assured them. “Like that Dickens we were just looking at, these aren’t your everyday run-of-the-mill books we’re talking about.”

  Their turn to shrug.

  The interrogation or consultation, whatever it was, went along like this for an hour or more before they arrived at some questions I had more or less anticipated, given they could get others to do their verifications and appraisals for them.

  Just a few more things that interested them, if I didn’t mind. Did Adam Diehl and I ever discuss forgery? Did we ever do business together? Did he ever approach me, as his sister’s boyfriend, for any favors or advice regarding forgeries?

  No, no, and no, I told them, forthright and if anything a little insulted. Maybe my mild annoyance showed or maybe it didn’t. Either way, I answered all their questions to the best of my knowledge. Had they a lie detector and examiner there, I would gladly have agreed to answer again and let the inky needle’s failure to jump reassure them.

  What I could say, and did, was that some of the regrettably damaged works were not fakes, as far as I could tell, and that they could run my opinions regarding each individual item past any number of other specialists in literary artifacts and they would find most if not all of them would likely concur with me. They assured me they would do just that, thanked me, and said I could go. I sensed they might have been disappointed, but what did I know?

  While I had over the years strongly suspected him of being a member of my erstwhile fraternity of forgers, I had never brought the matter up with Diehl, just as I told the cops, and obviously I never betrayed any of my suspicions to Meghan. But when, over a glass of wine before dinner, I revealed where I had been that day and the sorts of questions the authorities were asking me about forgery, rather than being concerned how it went, she rebuked me for not having told her I was called in, first, and second, that I had any idea about Adam and forgery.

  I said, “I know I should have told you they called, but I guess I wanted to protect you from having to worry about it. You’ve got enough on your hands as it is. And as for Adam, you’re all too aware I didn’t know him that well. Did I ever even lay eyes on his collection?”

  No need to relate every turn of the screw as our evening spiraled downward from there. Suffice it to say the poor woman turned on me for a few really rotten days and nights, threatened never to see me again. She was, and I state this with a curious sort of admiration, harder on me than the police had been.

  “How could you not have known about Adam? There’s no way you couldn’t have known,” she said, her voice tight, her face half as red as her hair.

  “Suspecting and knowing are two very different animals,” I countered.

  “Do you understand how humiliating this is? What if it gets around everywhere?” she asked. “My customers will laugh behind my back, or worse, they’ll feel sorry for me. I could lose my business.”

  “But you, you haven’t done anything wrong. Nobody’s accusing you of anything. And nobody but you is accusing me of anything, either.”

  “Between you and now Adam, why should anybody trust me any more? Why should I even trust myself?”

  Knowing I might better keep my mouth shut, but in a fit of exasperation, I said, “Speaking of trust. When they questioned you, did you tell them you thought I didn’t like your brother? Is that why they dragged me back in today?”

  “I never said anything of the kind.”

  “Because I couldn’t help but wonder, while I was sitting in their airless room going around in circles with them, if that wasn’t why I was there.”

  It went on like that, my feeble attempt at accusation having fallen flat. She suspected me of having been a pernicious influence on Adam, even of having worked secretly with him, all kinds of crazy things. I’d never seen her act like this before and was at a loss what to do beyond telling her she was wrong.

  Eventually the hostility, or anger, or shame, or the thorny combination of all of those and more passed. Meghan and I had weathered tough times in the past and we were going to get through this one, too. What she didn’t know, could never know, was that even if I had bothered to work with her brother, my influence on him would have been beneficial rather than pernicious—at least to his craft—but that I would never in a hundred millennia have shared my techniques, my supply sources, my tools, my passion with Adam Diehl or anybody else. It is possible that although she couldn’t fathom why I so adamantly denied having anything to do with Adam’s forgery, the adamancy itself and the indisputable truth of my denial finally got through to her.

  When we made up, strolling through Tompkins Square for coffee while she was on a lunch break, I told her, “Look, Meg, after what you’ve been through, it’s a wonder you’ve held yourself together as well as you have.”

  A cynic might see these words as clichéd, but they were offered in good faith. And sometimes, in the right circumstances, even the simplest cliché can carry profound weight. If, as Emerson wrote, every word was once an idea, every cliché was once a revelation.

  DESPITE MY EFFORTS TO THE CONTRARY and even as Meghan and I grew closer after our brief argument, Adam haunted my thoughts. Whether I was helping her in the bookshop or doing authentication and cataloguing at the auction house where I’d settled into as close to a permanent position as I ever would have, he was a ghostly presence. I would always be grateful for his bringing along his sister, some half-dozen years back, to the book fair where I first met her—a gratitude I never bothered expressing because I knew without asking how our early flirtations and eventual relationship chafed at him—but there wasn’t much else about the fellow that drew anything from me akin to warm amicability.

  I don’t remember for sure the first time I laid eyes on him, though I recognized the man in a nebulous across-the-room sort of
way some years before I even knew he had a sister and well before my forger’s days came to a dismal end. Adam Diehl was one of those people who slowly dawned on you. Who you realize, without giving it conscious thought, is someone you have seen before but didn’t know. His maker had given him a nondescript face, which probably aided him in his line of work. To say his skin was sallow might be a little mean-spirited, but that he could live beside the sea and maintain such a candle-wax complexion spoke volumes as to how little time he spent outdoors. He was thinner and taller than most, loose-jointed, one might say even willowy. He shared with Meghan, as I’d later find out when he introduced us, a head of wavy red hair and eyes the color of Noodler’s Baystate blue ink, emblems of their Irish heritage—indeed, Meghan had been born in the land of Yeats, Joyce, and Beckett, and had dual citizenship though she hadn’t visited the old country since childhood. His dress was studiously decades out of style, an eccentricity I admit I found kind of endearing. His inveterate blue-black blazer with its gold-trimmed crest-of-arms pocket patch, his white shirt and narrow black tie, even his gabardine trousers hung on his frame as if upon a secondhand-shop mannequin. Not unhandsome, he stood out from the crowd largely because of his height, hair, and tortoiseshell bifocals. Also, he had the thinnest wrists I had ever seen on a man and the most elegant, tapered fingers.

  Overall, an eccentric, an odd duck. But then antiquarian book fairs are, to mix a metaphor, beehives of odd ducks, and this dawning of Diehl occurred at rare book shows over the years, such as the annual international gathering of dealers at the Armory on Park Avenue. Once his presence did take hold, I noticed that he and I frequented many of the same specialists’ booths.