The Forger's Daughter Page 6

Again, nothing for me to do but wait. Ginger-head had returned to his baleful staring in our direction. He had the look of a loner, one who spent many hours in a basement mixing chemicals or practicing magic tricks. If he was indeed trying to eavesdrop on what we were discussing, the bar was too noisy. Though I couldn’t help but be curious why he was so interested, I forced myself to ignore him in order to concentrate on Slader.

  “I have irrefutable evidence of your guilt in the case of your brother-in-law’s—”

  “You’re deluded.”

  Slader revealed that chipped tooth once more. If I were a violent man, I might have wanted to knock it, along with some of the rest of his teeth, down his throat.

  “We both know certain, shall I say, unwholesome aspects about each other’s lives, but there are details we obviously aren’t aware of. You, for instance, have no idea that I’m a pretty decent outdoor photographer. Or used to be, years ago.”

  I shook my head and offered him a disparaging smile.

  Ignoring me, he continued. “When I used to visit Adam Diehl back in the halcyon days, I got some beautiful shots of the lighthouse out on Montauk Point, a lot of shorebirds, dramatic skies and waves.”

  “This is all terribly charming, Slader, but speaking of points, what’s yours?”

  “One winter morning, sometime predawn, I was out walking along the beach with the early-bird joggers. The sky was a weird green-gray. I took some stills of the rollers, some of gulls against the clouds.”

  “Very Ansel Adams of you.”

  “I also happened to get quite a sharp photograph of you leaving Diehl’s bungalow. And another of you getting into your car, a silver Volvo that looked like it was ready for the junkyard. I had a bad feeling when I saw you speed off. So I made like a zephyr myself and disappeared.”

  “Wish you’d stayed disappeared,” I muttered, then added, offhand, “One could ask what you were doing there at that hour.”

  “One could decline to answer,” he said.

  I gave this a moment’s reflection, then pressed forward. “If you’ve got this so-called evidence, why didn’t you turn it and me in a long time ago?”

  “Because I invest for the long term,” he said without the slightest hesitation, quietly, his brow wrinkling as he tented his fingertips under his chin. “You see, you lost me my friend and business partner, and in so doing you deprived me of substantial future income. What gain is there in it for me if you’re languishing in the joint, taking advantage of the prison library and communing with the chaplain?”

  The image made me laugh. “Sounds relaxing,” I said. “You must have enjoyed your time on the inside.”

  “Won’t say I didn’t. One learns a lot behind bars. For example, when you run afoul of agreed-upon terms, you pay a price. We had an agreement, you and I. You compensated me for my losses and we both moved on. Then you blew that deal by stealing from me again.”

  I cringed inwardly, knowing he wasn’t wrong. Years ago, I had purchased from Atticus a breathtakingly skillful forgery of some Arthur Conan Doyle documents—letters and a manuscript fragment—that I later learned had been fabricated by Slader. Driven by absurd rivalry, I forged a superior duplicate of his inventive original, and then, more brazen yet, I turned around and sold my forged forgery back to Atticus, thus rendering Slader’s “original” valueless. High-wire madness and, convincing as the documents were, not a single word had ever been so much as a figment of Doyle’s fertile imagination.

  “I gave you one more chance to make things good in your beloved Ireland—”

  “You knew it was impossible for me to start printing fakes on my boss’s press—”

  “—and you blew it again. That time you paid the price in three and a half fingers. And as it turned out, fate made the better investment for me. I got some good years of practice in seclusion while you’ve had plenty of time to hone your skills as a printer. So now you’re going to deliver your next installment.”

  “I owe you nothing, Slader.”

  At that he flared up. “You stole my life, my livelihood. This is all on you, my friend.”

  “Such righteous anger is unbecoming in a blackmailer.”

  “If this deal goes as it should, it can easily be the end of the matter,” he said, calm again, smoothing the palm of his right hand over the crown of his head. “Once and for all.”

  “You can’t be trusted, no matter what assurances you make. And you know it.”

  “Was that finally a confession I just heard? How refreshing,” he said.

  “It was a statement of fact.”

  “To be sure. So my proposal is simple, modest, straightforward, and poses no risk to you or your family.”

  “You sound like a cheap insurance salesman,” I tried, knowing I was boxed into at least hearing him out. Memory, being at times a mercurial monster, came at me just then from an unwelcome angle, as I recalled how this man’s threats in Kenmare had proved to be anything but empty. “I’m listening.”

  “Good man,” he said. “So then, you may or may not know that the fellow who handprinted Tamerlane, Calvin Thomas, wasn’t a very experienced printer. Far less experienced than you. Eighteen years old, just like Poe was. There’s no record that he printed anything more demanding than apothecary-shop labels, leaflets, maybe some calling cards, and so on before he produced the Poe pamphlet. Lowly jobbing work. Which is probably how the poor young poet could afford his services in the first place, assuming Poe even paid, which he likely didn’t, though nobody knows their arrangement for sure.”

  “Yes,” I began, “but Thomas didn’t have to replicate something that already existed. All he had to do was produce a passable—” before realizing, to my dismay, that I was being drawn, despite myself, into Slader’s fantasy.

  “Thanks to a fabricator I’ve known since long before I met you, I can provide paper from the period. Or paper that’ll pass close inspection as contemporary to the period.”

  Despite myself, I sighed. “Wove paper, not laid, right? Also, that text stock didn’t look handmade to me.”

  He brightened at my question. “Of course, machine-made and the correct weight, which I think is around three or four mils. Even the wire-mesh pattern is right, which isn’t that visible to the naked eye. It’s impressive and, as far as I’m concerned, even harder to replicate than the meatier papers of the sixteenth, seventeenth centuries with their chain and wire lines and inherent natural defects.”

  “Also, no watermark.”

  “What papermaker,” he asked, “with an ounce of pride would bother to watermark such mediocre stock?”

  How I hated to admit it to myself, but I felt a little intoxicated. Not from the Irish whiskey but from this dialogue tinged with the sacred, like Lazarus rising from the dead, as well as the profane, all but erotic in its forbiddenness and secrecy. Still, I crossed my arms and said, “There are other letterpress printers far more qualified for your job. Blackmail aside, I still don’t understand why you want me to do this.”

  Slader’s answer was calm and immediate. “Because we don’t trust anybody else to know just how unlawful this is and still move on it.”

  “That’s an insult.”

  “Better to take it as the compliment it’s meant to be.”

  I knew this was a crossroads in my life. But wasn’t certain which path, if either, was more wisely taken. “Were I to do this, and I emphasize were, I assume I’d be printing with plates made from high-quality photographic negs.”

  “You assume correctly. The display type and ornaments on the cover need to match the original, as do the age wear and staining. They have to be identical twins for everything to work.”

  “But then, if I’m following you, wouldn’t the original have to be degraded or changed afterward, to make it distinct from the copy that’s going back into Mrs. Fletcher’s case?”

  “It can’t be h
elped.” Slader nodded and continued speaking to me but with his eyes trained somewhere past my shoulder, maybe at an imperfection in the wall. “A sad but necessary business. All you need to worry about, first, is to make a credible doppelgänger.”

  Trying to conceal my horror at the idea of damaging, even slightly, an authentic first edition of Tamerlane, I said, “You know as well as I do how important condition is to rare book people. Vandalizing the original makes no sense. It’ll bring the value down.”

  “Ah, that’s where you’re wrong. With a book this desirable, condition’s a bit less important than with most firsts. Possibly the most famous, most distinctive copy out there has a sizable ring-shaped stain on its front cover. Some whiskey drinker like yourself must have used it as a coaster a long time ago.”

  “I know the one you’re talking about,” recognizing the copy he described as one in a private collection in New York. A blessedly brief image of my father rose to mind, my father who, if he’d been alive, would probably have been friends with that collector, even as he would have disowned me for sitting here with the likes of Slader.

  “None of the surviving copies is anywhere near mint, so let’s not make ourselves crazy. I might add, just for argument’s sake, that even a little defaced, a little imperfect, this Tamerlane deserves to be out in the world where all can admire it, instead of being locked in a vault that reeks of out-of-date eaux de parfum.”

  “What noble sentiments,” was all I could think to say in the face of such sublime audacity. “You expect me to believe you’re suddenly an idealist? A liberator of incarcerated rare books?”

  “Even so,” he came back, with a slight nod. “Now, you asked me earlier why we need you to do this, and I gave you an answer that was maybe a bit snide,” he said, an unwonted look of optimism on his face. “My apologies. The real reason is we need someone intimate with the business, someone motivated by fear of being compromised. And someone who can work with us when an undiscovered copy—in fact, the only extant Tamerlane signed by Poe—surfaces for authentication before it goes up to auction.”

  “It’s not signed,” I said.

  “Not as yet, true.”

  “Well, you can’t be accused of pulling punches.”

  “That means you accept the offer, I believe.”

  Unthinking, I swirled my glass and lifted it to my lips, then took a sip of whiskey-scented air before realizing I’d already finished my drink. Setting the tumbler back on the table, I asked, “Is there any benefit to me in all this, beside your guarantee of confidentiality in other matters?” and as I did so, I felt as helpless as one who, after slipping on a patch of black ice while walking down steep steps, finds himself mutely in midflight, arms and legs flailing, knowing a bad injury, even death, awaits him. “And guarantees about the safety of my wife and daughters.”

  Slader offered a galling sneer. “There are several mouths to feed here, but I think that might be possible.” After laying out the rest of his proposition, which was more generous than I might have expected—though I hadn’t come here looking to enter into any financial deal, quite the opposite—he said, “By the way, I have a question of my own.”

  “That being?”

  “That being, who in their right mind would name a child Maisie? Doesn’t seem fair, given how poorly she fared in that Henry James novel.”

  “What Maisie Knew, you mean?”

  “Lot of hate in that book, you know.”

  I didn’t respond, in part because I didn’t think it was a question seriously posed, but also because I didn’t know the answer. Instead, I took out my wallet to pay for the drinks. “You’ll be in touch?”

  “Tomorrow,” he said. “When your wife and young Maisie are out of the house to go fetch your older daughter, who, I assume, will be assisting you with the printing as ever. If you planned on joining them, don’t. You usually stay home when they pick her up anyway, so that shouldn’t be a problem.”

  Floored by the frosty confidence with which he made these statements, as well as their accuracy, I sat back, wondering how long he had been spying on me and my family. I looked past Slader and saw that the ginger-headed man who’d been watching us had settled up and vanished. Another drinker now occupied his stool.

  “You’ve gotten older, Will. Set in your ways, given to routine. I know more about you and yours than you might care to imagine. For instance, I’m sure you’d have preferred that Nicole skip that art reception she’s attending tonight, unfortunately scheduled on a Friday, when she usually comes up. But if you look at it from her perspective, the Saturday morning trains are less crowded and tend to run on time. Preferable for her, I think, no?”

  “Goodbye, Henry.” And with that I rose.

  “Till tomorrow,” he said, looking straight ahead at where I’d been sitting.

  I left the tavern, which had grown noisier while we were there, and emerged from its merry gloom into the late afternoon light of the bustling village. After climbing into my car, a worse-for-wear minivan we’d bought some years ago, where I had parked it in front of the inn, I sat there with my hands draped over the steering wheel, thinking, or trying to think, about what had just happened.

  One of my guiltiest pleasures as a boy, embarrassing as it is to admit from the distant vantage of adulthood, had nothing to do with pornographic magazines, violent comics, anything of the kind. No, when my parents were out of the apartment and I was left to my own devices, I loved nothing better than to secretly pull down a first edition from my father’s collection and, against the rules, read the book cover to cover. I was careful. Knew not to hold an eighteenth-century octavo in contemporary calf wide open, but rather at a prudent angle so its hinges wouldn’t be strained. Knew my hands had to be clean and dry, not something puerile consumers of porn needed to worry about. So it was I read my way, over several weeks, through a 1749 first-edition set—six volumes bound in sprinkled calf, with engraved armorial bookplates on each pastedown—of Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, looking for, and not finding, the dirty parts.

  Driving home from Rhinebeck, recollecting this youthful indiscretion, I realized that I intended that night to read the poems in Poe’s Tamerlane in their original binding, just as juvenile Poe himself saw them in print for the first time. No matter how jejune the poetry, how compromised the copy might be, reading the priceless pamphlet from a bygone epoch was the only way to make my experience meaningful to me. Why? Because this was how I might best begin to familiarize myself with the overall look and feel of its unevenly inked pages, the featherlight heft of it in my hands. Also, it would constitute a first step toward acknowledging and owning that I was in the midst of falling again from grace. It was a fall I suppose I had always known was inevitable. As warm wind from the open car windows swept around my face, I felt at once melancholy and ecstatic.

  When she was four years old, Nicole could draw a perfect straight line. Before she was six, she could draw flawless concentric circles, even harder to do. By the time she was ten, she was able, without any help from her father, over the course of a snowbound week during winter break from school, to produce an admirably detailed pen-and-ink drawing replicating one of Piranesi’s etchings of Rome. Not faultless by any stretch. She was no Piranesi, as she was the first to avow, and had never set foot in Rome, but her reproduction was as respectable as any copyist much older and more experienced might produce. It hangs, framed, in the guest bedroom at the farmhouse. That she didn’t sign it as her own creation showed how mature she was from the beginning.

  Given Will’s gifts as a calligrapher, and the bond he shared with Nicole as they sat together at the kitchen table while he gently helped her hone her skills, I wasn’t surprised at how steadily our daughter progressed as an artist. And given my own passion for art, we were happy to pass dreamy long hours in museums where she could make friends, as she liked to put it, with O’Keefe and Cézanne, van Dyck and van Gogh, Degas and Lége
r. With every visit, her knowledge grew by the leaps and bounds of a Matisse dancer. When it came to budgeting her supplies—pens, nibs, inks, paper, canvases—we were the epitome of indulgent. Nothing made me happier than to see her hazel eyes light up when she opened a fresh sketch pad and box of oil crayons and sat down to draw.

  Nicole never cared about most things other girls her age craved. By middle school, her daily outfits consisted of paint-stained sweatshirts, cuffed jeans, and heavy black boots. She wasn’t antisocial as such, was always an excellent student, but as she reached her teens, going out on dates, hitting movies, attending rock concerts were lower among her priorities than drawing, painting, learning lithography. In retrospect, it should have come as no surprise that she would want to treat even her own skin as a canvas. After a prolonged phase of lobbying, Nicole convinced me and Will to let her mark her entry into young adulthood with a de rigueur tattoo, though neither of us was thrilled by this idea that had consumed her as flame consumes kindling. She chose a lovely if fierce kingfisher, her favorite bird and spirit animal, perched on a branch, its blue crest like a shock of electricity, its eyes majestic, its long beak trained ahead as it prepared to impale a fish, or anything else it fancied. Since the kingfisher was inked on her shoulder, it remained hidden most of the time. To this day, embarrassing as it is to confess, her fearsome totem sometimes takes me aback.

  When she emerged from the Maple Leaf onto the open-air platform in Rhinecliff, her kingfisher caught my eye, as Nicole wore a camisole with a blue-jean shirt tied around her waist. Even down here by the Hudson, whose low waves lapped against the rocks that paralleled the track, it was muggy from the rains, hot from a strong morning sun that had been cloaked behind clouds for much of the month. Nicole smiled at me while Maisie skipped over to help with one of her bags, and I thought to myself, though I’d never mortify her by saying so, what a beautiful young woman she had become. Quirky, yes; a little idiosyncratic, sure; but stylish in her own way. Her dark auburn hair was cut unevenly across her forehead and above her shoulders, no doubt by herself. As ever, no makeup, though she didn’t really need any. She’d left her trademark black leather boots in the city, exchanged today for a pair of cordovan clogs. An aficionado of silver rings, she wore several on each hand.