The Forgers Page 20

  How did I know this? Letters to her, simply. Adam Diehl, for all his innumerable faults, was a pen-and-paper letter writer, which I admired. And Meghan, no doubt trusting that her boyfriend wouldn’t read private correspondence, was never one to hide them from prying eyes, my eyes. This would have been a few weeks before my car needed its spurious repairs.

  Maggie, thanks for the five hundred to get the gas and electric co & another creditor off my back. You’re the best sister ever. Hope your shop is doing great. In a rush here but can I ask you a question? I don’t have the guts to ask you in person, especially because I know how much you like him, but do you totally trust this guy you’re dating? You sure he’s on the up and up? I’m trying to look out for you, okay. Bunch of people respect and admire him, but a friend of mine thinks otherwise. I don’t know. Just wondering. Love, Adam

  That friend was Henry Slader, as far as I am concerned, my reputation being what it otherwise was at the time. Not a single rare book dealer ever suspected me, or if they did, they sold what I had sold them knowing I guaranteed my materials and accepted returns for a full refund, no questions asked. The book trade was, as with any other business, one in which reputation meant everything. World affairs have always been implemented on similar lines. A diplomatic handshake might mean averting a war.

  No, I never liked this Adam. But now he was in danger, not to mince words. He not only threatened me with losing the sole woman aside from my mother who loved me and whom I loved, too, my darling Meghan. What was more, this hapless remora with his suspect signatures and idiotic letters that brought the cops to my door, or so I believed, threatened my first love and livelihood, my forgery. Hate was not strong enough a word to characterize how I felt. Disgust, loathing, contempt, just hand me a thesaurus and watch me fill pages with vile synonyms to describe Adam Diehl, doomed neophyte. And he had no idea of the animus I felt toward him.

  On the fatal night, as the dime detective novel phrase has it, after Meghan left my apartment around ten to head back to hers, I dressed, telephoned her as usual to make sure she got home safely, and left. Making sure none of my neighbors were out and about in the hall—I would have abandoned my project had I run into anyone I knew—I grabbed the subway out to Sunset Park. Feigning exhaustion, I dropped my head forward, chin on chest, to partly obscure fellow passengers’ view of my face. Watchman’s cap and hands stuffed inside my coat pockets helped further to camouflage me, not that anybody was looking. My repair shop man was good to his word, a key to the garage hidden where he said it would be. The neighborhood was dead and I slipped into the night, certain of not being seen.

  Every hour was a dream when I drove out. Every minute was like an unconsciousness so blank and empty of imagery and visual content and of sound too, though there must have been screaming, no not screaming, not a sound at all but an audible whump when I hit him from behind with a hard object, a rolling pin that sufficed to stun him as he sat at his desk unaware an intruder had entered the cottage. I wanted to extract one hand but didn’t know which was his writing hand, and so I used his cleaver—Meghan’s and his parents had outfitted their kitchen beautifully, being amateur chefs themselves, inspiring my girlfriend to collect and disseminate cookbooks—to take away both. As a longtime student of criminal behavior from the mysteries my father owned by the hundreds, I was of course wearing gloves and disposable shoe covers, and went about my business swiftly and as silently as possible, leaving the cottage under dark of night. Pure dumb luck that a light snowfall had just started coming down after I got to my car, with bloodied gloves and bloodier hands in the thick plastic bag I’d brought for the purpose. I arrived back well before daybreak, having replaced the car at the repair shop and returned home, showered and waited for the phone call from Meghan. As for the hands, they were easy enough to dismember, joint by joint, bone by bone, and wrap individually in tissue before flushing each piece down the toilet.

  That Diehl had managed to fashion makeshift bandages from dish towels, I suppose by using his teeth and stumps, so he didn’t bleed to death, was unnerving if impressive. Even if he had lived, though, he wouldn’t have been able reliably to accuse me of the attack since he never set eyes on me. For all intents and purposes, I was never there. By moving wildly about, as I picture it, in a state of semiconscious panic fueled by the adrenaline of a man fighting death, stumbling through the disarray of books on the floor, knocking furniture over before passing out again, he managed to confuse a crime scene that the authorities would, as fortune darkly shined, themselves further deface, further botch.

  The phone soon rang. Bereft, she was in Tompkins Square, schoolchildren shouting with glee in the background. My first words to her, after hearing what had happened, were, “Where is he now?” knowing full well that I stood at the beginning of a journey in which the less I knew about Adam Diehl, the more I learned to push him out of my consciousness, the better off I would be. Meghan’s dying brother was anathema to me. Having stood between me and what I most cherished, he brought on his own little apocalypse, and there was nothing I could have done to prevent his pitiful outcome.

  That was in the dead middle of winter whereas today we find ourselves at the solstice, with a gentle snowfall starting up in the bluish late-afternoon light. As I sit here alone at the kitchen table in our East Village apartment while Meghan and Nicole are up at Rockefeller Center visiting the big Christmas tree on display there and watching the ice skaters do their scratch spins and figure eights, out of the blue I remember that night when I couldn’t sleep, and when I recapitulated Diehl’s final days and hours as best I could, with recollections as aligned with the truth as a forger’s faulty memory allowed. I am relieved I kept my promise to myself not to ponder those dark times any further. While I know that the refusal to think about a wicked act does not absolve one, it does carry the benefit of release, of liberation, and for that I am grateful.

  When Meghan and Nicole get home, which ought to be pretty soon, I plan on getting our girl warmed up with some hot cocoa before leading one of our regular father-daughter calligraphy lessons, much the same as her namesake grandmother used to do with me. A shame she will never meet her grandmother, study the crafting of letters and flow of words with her, who was a far superior teacher than I will ever be. Even more’s the pity, since young Nicole is—and I posit this not as a dad but an objective expert—bursting with talent. She has a natural aptitude, an unpolished genius, if you will, with pen and paper. I remember my mother being awed by the concentric circles I drew when I was Nicole’s age or even a bit older, but they couldn’t have been as perfectly drawn as my daughter’s. And she makes them over and over as if it were as simple as breathing in and breathing out. For her sixteenth birthday, I plan on giving her the Arthur Conan Doyle pen that I myself inherited, passing it along to a third generation in our family, a talisman for her to preserve just as her father has and his father did before him.

  As for what she will do one day with her calligraphic skills, I cannot say. Perhaps she will become a painter or a set designer, or maybe she’ll end up doing something altogether different. Even if the dreams she pursues when she grows up have nothing to do with the act and art of writing, someone, possibly a future best friend or lover or even spouse, will notice the grace of her script on a restaurant bill or mundane shopping list, and comment, “Hey, Nicole, you have the most beautiful handwriting I’ve ever seen.” And just maybe, if my wrathful shadows don’t catch up with me and devour the one who got away, she will say with conspicuous pride, “My father taught me when I was young.” She will think of me then, a man who now must forever be quietly glancing over his shoulder, with unreserved love in her heart.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Over the years in which I have been involved with the rare book community, both as a bookseller in my twenties and later as a collector, I became friends with more book dealers, special collection librarians, and fellow bibliophiles than I can possibly tally. Richard Schwarz of Stage House II Books in Boulder,
Colorado, particularly inspired my earliest love of the field. I owe these book people a debt of gratitude for all I learned from them. It is important for me to state, emphatically, that most booksellers and collectors are noteworthy for their honesty, intellectual vigor, great wit, and wisdom, and have never made the dark journey that some depicted in this novel have taken.

  Three respected bookmen in particular, Nicholas Basbanes, Tom Congalton, and James Jaffe, I want to thank for taking time to read the manuscript and offer their expert opinions on the complex world of rare books and manuscripts. I also want to thank Grove Atlantic’s Morgan Entrekin, Peter Blackstock, Deb Seager, and Allison Malecha for their belief in this book from the beginning. My friends Douglas Moore, Nicole Nyhan, Eimear Ryan, Hy Abady, Thomas Johnson, and Peter Straub offered thoughtful comments about my manuscript in progress, as did Henry Dunow, who is not only a superlative agent but as serious and sharp a reader as I have ever been privileged to work with. Heartfelt appreciation to all. As for Cara Schlesinger and my editor, Otto Penzler, my gratitude to them for their support in different ways, my thanks for their inspiration, is beyond expression.

  Table of Contents

  The Forgers

  Also by Bradford Morrow

  Title

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraphs

  The Forgers

  Acknowledgments

  Back Cover