The Forgers Page 5

  Now let me say in no uncertain terms that a night in jail, especially in the jail known as the Tombs in lower Manhattan, is one night too many. Not knowing whether I faced more than just that one, I resolved to do everything within my now somewhat constrained powers to make things right, to pay the myriad pipers and try to resuscitate my life. Meghan was crucial in this process.

  “You have such amazing knowledge and skill,” she assured me. “It’s only a matter of putting them to work in ways that benefit not you but others.”

  Inspirational words, though I had to admit to myself, and myself only, that somewhere along the line I had evolved a deluded, fanciful, and finally illicit conceit that my work did benefit others by bringing the beauty of previously unwritten words and ideas into the world. Pure narcissism, I guess, in the end. Not the kind of philosophy that would aid in marching me out of the financial, legal, and ethical bog into which I had slid—or, rather, been slyly thrust.

  One of my first calls was to my Providence colleague, who had already heard about it down the lightning-quick rare book grapevine. My incarceration wasn’t, thank heavens, glamorous or significant enough to make the news, but dealers are born information junkies and as given to gossip as any smallish, specialized community out there.

  “I have to admit,” Atticus scolded, “there were moments I suspected you of something like this. They were far and few between, mind you, but once in a while a book or letter was so exceptional that, well, I wondered. Then I always remembered your father and told myself that an apple can’t fall that far from the tree. Especially such a great tree as he was.”

  Yes, he was furious with me and also understandably hurt. I told him, truthfully, that quite a few of the things I had sold him over the years were genuine, mixed in with my admitted fabrications. Further, I said, sheepish in my new role as scoundrel, I would buy any and everything back, plus, say, twenty percent—thirty—for the trouble, no questions asked. I had always lived rather modestly in my rent-controlled apartment and cheap studio, with no expensive vices other than my bibliophilia, and had built up a decent savings on top of the money I’d inherited when my father had died, money he wisely invested and I carefully maintained, from which I could make restitutions. Too, I would dip into my permanent collection—my now rather impermanent collection—and sell off some much-loved personal favorites in order to raise yet more money. All I asked, pled for, in return was that he not press any charges or sue me, to which he agreed.

  To my deep relief, most others in the trade took a similar approach to the situation, preferring to get their money refunded over pursuing lawsuits and making appearances in court. The police confiscated the fakes that were removed from my apartment as well as collected from far and wide, and to this day I’m in the dark about what happened to them, though I would love to find out. My father had never harbored a deep affection for the police and I suppose I followed in his worthy footsteps in this regard. I enquired, more than once, but was told by my probation officer to drop the matter. The less said, the better, he advised me. The thing is, I continued to think my handiworks were intrinsically valuable whereas in the eyes of the law they were utterly worthless. Still, an enterprising member of the force with access to confiscated materials might sensibly agree with my assessment and spirit away a volume or three or ten, unnoticed over time, and quietly get them back out into the market. I could just hear him describing them to a secondhand bookseller, my phantom dirty cop. “We found these in my grandma’s house when she died, guess my grandfather had been a collector back in the day, don’t know what they’re worth but my family’s looking to sell them.” The secondhand dealer buys them on the low side and calls another dealer a bit higher up in the hierarchy, says he picked up some nice things over the transom, and flips the books for a profit. Assuming the next dealer was unaware of their tarnished provenance, he or she marks them to full retail value and puts them up for sale. Who knows but that at some Armory show in the future my ostracized children will begin to resurface, one by one?

  As might be expected, Meghan’s friends and some of the customers at her shop with whom she was close expressed concern about my trustworthiness, whether or not it would hurt her own reputation as a bookseller to remain involved with me, and god knows what other criticisms. These irreproachable bastions of sinless good, for all their dire efforts to save Meghan from my destructive self, were, I’m relieved to report, hopelessly out of touch with just how close we were. My mistake, my crime, my being outed weren’t going to shatter our love any more than if she did something similarly wrong. If anything, my trials, as it were, opened up deeper avenues of love than we might otherwise have traveled. While I couldn’t fairly fault her confidantes—I was the “author” of my own troubles—it didn’t mean they failed to irritate me with their pious, holier-than-thou meddling. Still, as I say, this was predictable and mundane.

  What was not predictable was Adam’s solicitude. Was he supportive of me and Meghan because he knew that I knew about him, dreaded I might sink some accusatory talons into the soft underbelly of his quack ventures and drag him down with me, out of the forgers’ firmament? Did he quietly admire my resilient refusal to let this ruin me? Had he finally found it in himself to stop being rankled about my relationship with his sister, one that forced him to share her time and affection?—never to forget, they were orphans from early on. Maybe, doubtful, and absolutely not were the answers to these questions. Still, despite snippets of overheard—and admittedly, one time, eavesdropped—phone conversations Meghan had with her brother in which it was clear he wished she would find herself another boyfriend, he seemed more sorry for me than triumphant.

  Over time, fortunately, just as her meddlesome friends moved on to offer their prudent advice about the sins of others among their acquaintance, Adam slowly withdrew back into his own ascetic life in Montauk. These developments came as equal relief. My brief jail time and long days of sweeping cigarette butts, dead leaves, used condoms, and the like in city parks and along median strips of avenues, fulfilling my obligatory community service hours one full contractor’s bag at a time, did finally come to an end. After being turned down at a number of establishments, I was finally hired at a small but distinguished auction house. My new employer had known me before on a casual basis and had always admired my expertise in literary and political autograph materials from a distance, heard good things about me. Thank heavens I had never consigned any of my handiwork in his rooms, so my slate was clean. The probationary terms he set were plain, simple, and I thought very doable: Don’t mess up.

  Mess up I didn’t. I arrived on time daily and went straight to my cataloguing desk, where I researched and wrote bibliographic descriptions of a host of books and manuscripts in my preferred field of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century British and American rarities. By not being in the business of buying or selling any items myself, I was able to use my years of expertise to examine and describe others’ holdings and steer entirely clear of any personal involvement that would result in my being paid a penny more than my salary allotted. Oh, sure, I suppose I could have furtively snuck a signature into some book that had arrived unsigned at the auctioneer’s. But I would easily have gotten caught. Too many people in our offices, for one, and besides, the consignor would know. There was no specific profit in cataloguing, which provided me with a truly safe work environment to regain my place in society. If I didn’t feel the giddy, almost ecstatic pleasure of forgery, I was rewarded most every day by a sensation of mellow happiness, the serenity that comes from conducting oneself honestly, on the up and up.

  FEBRUARY SNOW AND MARCH SLEET gave way to April rain and May sunshine, and still no arrest had been made in Adam’s death. To say this frustrated Meghan would be an understatement. As for myself, I suppose I had read too many Conan Doyle stories in which Holmes deduces his path to the killer, quoting Tacitus’s epigram “Omne ignotum pro magnifico”—everything unknown is wonderful—as he goes, doing his drugs and ge
ntly teasing Watson while puffing his pipe, not to be underwhelmed by the investigators’ failure to find their man. That Adam had knowingly sold ersatz signatures and documents would necessarily have exposed him to some very outraged, even enraged buyers—were they made aware of his counterfeiting exploits—over the years. Just ask me; I know. And yet who in their right mind would be angry enough to kill, assuming it was Adam’s forgeries that got him into trouble?

  As it happened, he was not as good at keeping records over the years as I had always been. If my meticulous records made any plausible deniability impossible during my own time afoul the law, Adam Diehl’s lack thereof ironically protected the identity of some of those who might possibly have had a hand in denying him his life. So unless clients stepped forward demanding money back for items he had sold to them, and curiously few did, there was no money trail to follow. What was more, the messy crime scene in the Montauk bungalow never turned up any very usable forensics, which didn’t help matters, either. It did come out, to Meghan’s discouragement, that the first officers to arrive contaminated quite a bit of evidence by ham-handedly, if not ham-footedly, going through the bungalow, stepping on books and blood, their guns drawn in case a bad guy still lurked on the premises. So, with the search stymied and most manpower reallocated, the scent lost if there ever was one, Adam’s murder moved closer and closer to a cold case file.

  It had been bittersweet when the police informed Meghan that they had done everything necessary toward completion of their work at the bungalow, and she could feel free to access the house whenever she liked. Bitter because it underscored the investigation’s having come to a vague, no, realistic if incomplete kind of end. Sweet, if sweet it could be called, because the Diehl cottage was still a beautiful, sentimentally rich place in Meghan’s view, despite its recent gruesome history. Pleasure-filled memories of childhood and of good times with Adam in later adult years centered on Montauk, and with my help she was going to do her best to see whether positive memories might not overcome the bad. If it proved impossible—and it well might, given she had lost her entire family in or near the prime oceanfront property—we agreed that Meghan would offer it up for sale. Montauk beachfront land is golden, and a conservative estimate would put the bungalow in the low seven figures, far more than enough for us to make a fresh start together somewhere else if we wanted. We even discussed taking a few months off from our work in New York, perhaps splurging on a rental somewhere warm—in the south of France or the Italian Riviera, maybe. It wasn’t as if our first years together hadn’t been tested by problems. A clean break from trials and tragedies might be the best medicine.

  One evening after work, Meghan surprised me.

  “Let’s go to Montauk,” she said out of the blue. “I think I’m finally ready.”

  I hesitated, asked, “You’re sure?” wondering if she was truly prepared to visit the site of her brother’s slaughter.

  “I’m sure of it,” she replied. “In fact, I’d like to go first thing tomorrow if you’re free. It’s a Saturday, supposed to be nice weather. The staff can run the shop. There’s no need to put this off another day.”

  We rose predawn, quickly packed a picnic lunch, drove through the Midtown Tunnel to the Long Island Expressway and on toward Montauk. Sipping coffee from a Thermos, we watched a flat orange sun fatten, round, and rise into a flawless morning sky. The traffic at that hour was light and we made good time. When I pulled off the highway, the sun was fully up, the joggers and dog walkers were about, and soon enough we rolled into the short lane that led to the bungalow.

  “Would you like to stretch your legs first, take a stroll on the beach?”

  Knowing that in my reluctant way I was hoping to mitigate the trauma of being here, Meghan turned to me with a grateful smile, said, “We can, afterward. Let’s do this while I still have the nerve.”

  We were surprised to see that yellow police tape still crisscrossed the front door.

  Turning to Meghan, I asked, “Wasn’t the investigation all wrapped up here?”

  “That’s what they told me.”

  “Probably just forgot to remove the tape, but maybe we should leave it alone. There another door?”

  “Around back facing the water.”

  I followed her along the side of the cottage past thorny barberry bushes that looked not to have been trimmed for years, downhill on a narrow private path past heavy pilings supporting a cantilevered porch that overlooked the panorama of pristine beach. We climbed a flight of uneven stairs set partly into the hillside leading up from the sand. The rhythmic roar and whoosh of the waves was punctuated by gulls squawking as they soared, much like kites on unseen strings, above our heads. On the deck, a couple of weatherworn wooden chairs, paint peeling, lay on their sides. We righted them, then walked to the back door whose screen was ajar, clapping anxiously in the skittish breeze. Clear as the sky was, a fine mist off the rollers gave the air a rich, salty fragrance as it dampened our skin.

  I stood aside so Meghan could go in first. The odor inside was awful: sterile yet tainted, musty and chemical-acrid. We pulled up the window shades that faced onto the deck and Atlantic horizon beyond and opened the windows to let in some fresh sea air. Without saying a word, looking around the suddenly sun-flooded room, I knew we were both relieved to see that few signs of the chaos left behind in Adam’s studio were visible. A mitigation crew had come in and removed anything biologically hazardous, which meant they had mopped the hardwood of dried blood, steamed the carpets, washed the walls, and so forth. The vandalized items and other miscellanea relevant to the crime had since been photographed and removed to a lab where no doubt they would remain in storage until the perpetrator had been caught, charges brought, and Adam’s ruined stuff submitted as evidence.

  “For some reason I didn’t expect them to have left behind any of his books,” Meghan said, walking to the shelves that lined the walls and randomly pulling one down.

  “I’m glad they did,” I said, following her. “I guess these weren’t useful to the cops so they’re all yours now. Everything here is,” I continued, squinting at an Augustus John drawing in a vintage gilt frame over Diehl’s desk. It appeared to be quite genuine, not that I knew or even sensed that he might have been into fin de siècle art forgery.

  Meghan handed me the book she held, a bright dust-jacketed copy of Carl Sandburg’s The American Songbag, signed on the front endpaper. “Is it?”

  I looked at the copyright page, 1927. “Is it a first edition? Yes.”

  “No, no, please. Is it real?”

  “The autograph?”

  She frowned with obliging impatience as I turned back to the signature, knowing that she knew that I knew what she’d meant. The look on her face was apprehensive, hopeful, serious. I studied it, having decided what my answer would be whether or not the autograph was forged.

  To my delight, it sang with authenticity. Sandburg’s wide-nibbed fountain pen was evident, as were his Yankee legibility and baseline as level and straight as a schoolmarm’s ruler. The garlanded “db” ligature in his surname made it look as if the poet had dropped a whimsical, curlicued “M” smack dab in the middle of “Sandburg.” All of it was, blessedly, and not to mention surprisingly, correct.

  “Right as rain,” I assured her.

  A random search through the flyleaves and title pages of a number of other books often produced the same happy outcome. The first editions were first editions. The condition was uniformly solid. Most of the authorial inscriptions were right, so far as I could tell on the spot without doing any research, and those that weren’t I simply kept to myself. Meghan’s pale face was aglow, rosy as a Homeric dawn with relief. Not because she had inherited a valuable collection of literary rarities but because, however unsalvageably ruined as he himself might have been, Adam’s reputation was, to her mind, very much rehabilitated. He was not entirely a fraud, and these books on the shelves of the house where he had spent the last years of his life proved it. His bibliographic
knowledge seemed estimable, and while his collection was quirky—a more flat-footed collector would have doggedly assembled a wall of standard, canon-approved titles—it showed character. Why he would bother to mix in forgeries of his own making, given they were often subpar, with genuine works was beyond me. Who was he kidding? Not himself and not me.

  Strange fellow, I thought, then asked, “While we’re at the authentication game, what about that Augustus John drawing? You’re the art afficionado here.”

  Without even looking at it, she said, “It better be right. My grandfather on my father’s side bought it from John’s nephew in the old country, and it’s been in the family for decades. Isn’t it beautiful?”

  It was beautiful. A sensual portrait of a Pre-Raphaelite belle, chin lightly perched on her wrist as her frank gaze met the viewer directly in the eye. Admiring the deftness of the artist’s pencil, touched by the story of the drawing’s provenance and its being passed down from generation to generation in Meghan’s family, I felt a sudden ache of regret, of sadness, of disgust that people such as myself and the late Adam Diehl would deign to falsify objects as exquisite as this drawing. Yet we did. Just as perhaps someone a century or so ago might have faked this very image that Meg and I were now admiring. We did so not merely because we could but because our own passions, skewed according to society’s dictates, led us to do it. Our passions may be different from what Augustus John felt toward his female model, with whom he had clearly been in love, but were borne of masterful skill and inspiration nevertheless.

  It was a confounding moment, my thoughts reeling as I pictured the violent scene that had occurred in this very room. None of it seemed real. But then the “real” never did much for me, I must admit. I understood just then that, finally, the greatest difference between Meghan’s brother and her lover was—with the curious exception of that Conan Doyle cache I bought from Atticus Moore—just this. Whereas he copied, I created. Whereas he was an artisan, I was an artist. But whereas he was dead without further recourse, I felt myself in a limbo. If I could draw with the mastery of Augustus John but was not Augustus John, why should I deny myself the chance to capture his experience of making this drawing, or one akin, or words possibly even better? I remembered something the greatest art forger of the twentieth century, Elmyr de Hory, once said about his canvases, that if you hang them in a museum with a collection of great paintings, and if they hang there long enough, they become real. He was a true believer.