The Forgers Page 9

  Sitting alone on one of the sun-warmed boulders that had been placed there thousands of years before, feeling a little sacrilegious given it was a burial site, we said nothing for a time. It was curious, our silence in this silent place, as Meghan and I were usually involved in a constantly streaming dialogue. Without either of us saying as much, we each knew what the other was thinking. Maybe we had managed to break the bonds that held us back in the States, break away from our different orphan stories to forge a new life together. Sure, Meghan had lost her parents in a single tragic event while mine had died separately, one slowly eaten alive by cancer, the other felled by a heart attack. And whereas I never had a sibling to turn to, hers—one whose very lifeblood derived from her, it seemed—was gone. We were both alone and anything but alone. I looked at her, then glanced away toward the enclosure of pristine fir trees, thinking, Yes, we’ll make this work, a pair of orphans together forging a new life.

  What ever happened to the word “forge” that it had acquired such an ugly meaning, I wondered, my thoughts straying. Here was a term that indicated slow and steady progress, a forging ahead against odds. A forge was a hearth, a furnace in whose fiery heat the blacksmith pounded metal into the useful shapes of horseshoes, andirons, tools with which to build. Way back in the fourteenth century, at a time when different people gathered at this stone circle, to forge meant to create, to make and shape, like a Joycean smithy of the soul. When did the virtue go out of this beautiful old word? When did it evolve into a derogatory that meant to defraud, to counterfeit, to falsify? And yet who was I to think such thoughts in this place as old as Stonehenge, older than the dirty definition of forgery, I who embodied the definition of the evil side of this otherwise noble word?

  As I had no answer to this last question, it was one I recognized I needed to let go of that day and hope it never returned.

  Yes, Slader did contact me again. This time his letter stipulated a place and time for us to meet. I suppose that given we had encountered and recognized one another at the fair, the ice was broken, as it were, and getting together to cut our deal was somehow less an onerous, appalling task. Prior to our meeting, I got it in my head to make one last beautiful forgery before depositing what was left of my pens, my inks, and other paraphernalia in the garbage. I bested Slader’s Baskerville archive, writing it out verbatim, not unlike Pierre Menard with his Don Quixote in Borges’s story, correcting any and all minute flaws in the calligraphy, getting Doyle’s sometimes idiosyncratic hand just right. During our minute-long exchange in a Greek coffee shop not far from Washington Square—the James allusion couched in the rendezvous spot Slader named was not lost on me—I gave him back his “original” knowing that a newer original now existed, far closer to what the master would have scribed, had he ever done so in the first place.

  “We’re done?” I asked him.

  I noticed he seemed far more nervous than I felt.

  “Because we had better be done,” I ventured, trying to set on my face a steely look of both resolve and threat. I didn’t envy him his messy life, a life entangled in profit and deceit, secrecy and inevitable ruin. Myself, I was finished with all that, or so I hoped with an almost religious fervency, a fervency that quite nearly equaled the passion that used to be reserved for the intimate acts of forgery in which I used to luxuriate.

  “Done,” he said and, without counting the money or peering inside the manila envelope that housed his Baskerville forgery, left. Out of nowhere, one of my favorite lines in all of Conan Doyle’s Holmes adventures came to mind as I watched him disappear out the door, a line in “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle,” in which Holmes introduces himself to the hapless, rat-faced larcenist at the center of that mystery. This man—a white-cheeked, would-be jewel thief named James Ryder—responds to Holmes’s statement, “I think that I could be of assistance to you,” by demanding, “You? Who are you? How could you know anything of the matter?” Holmes tells the naif his name and then defines his entire purpose in life, his philosophy and fundamental creed. “It is my business,” he says, “to know what other people don’t know.” Words to live by, I thought when I first read that sentence in my very early teens. Words to live by.

  Meghan sold a large percentage of her bookshop to a collective of her employees with very generous terms for payment. Indeed, we dispossessed ourselves of almost everything aside from clothing, a few favorite books, various childhood souvenirs. My car went to a junkyard where the scrappers gave me a hundred dollars, which happened to be more than the thing was worth on the market. As a personal gesture to Atticus Moore, one meant silently to atone for having sold him those forgeries, I consigned most of what was left of my permanent collection, telling him to send me whatever he thought was fair for what he realized in sales whenever it was convenient, and no rush about it. No, this didn’t erase my treachery but it somehow drew off, at least to my mind, a little of its poison. These monies plus the proceeds from the Montauk sale gave us a comfortable cushion and the freedom to start over as we saw fit.

  Meghan and I drove one day to our favorite restaurant in Kinsale, a seafood joint called Fishy Fishy, where just-caught hake and haddock were served in the cool blue shade of awnings outdoors. We were trading the small talk of contented married folks against the background of seagulls screeching and chattering over the bay when she said something that caught me off guard.

  “I have a question I’ve been wanting to ask for the longest time.” She spoke in a tone of voice that was perfectly even, betraying not an iota of accusation or even particular concern.

  “What’s that, darling woman.”

  “It’s a stupid question and you’ll probably laugh at me—”

  “Nothing you say is stupid,” I assured her, taking a sip from my pint of Beamish.

  “You never visited my brother out in Montauk before we were together, did you?”

  “No, like I’ve always said, we really only knew each other at fairs and in the occasional bookshop.”

  “And you and I never went out there once we started seeing each other.”

  Where was she going with this, I wondered, and waited, shaking my head.

  “So how was it you knew the way to the bungalow that first morning when you drove us out there? No map and no directions from me?”

  Taken aback, I couldn’t afford to pause a moment longer than I did before saying, “But you’re wrong. You’re not remembering right. You did give directions.”

  Her turn to hesitate. “You’re sure about that?”

  Encouraged by her uncertainty, I insisted it was impossible I could ever have found my way to his oceanside door on my own. Persuaded, she tucked her hair behind her ear and offered me one of her smiles so richly touched by love that I felt there were few men alive more fortunate than I.

  JUST AS A STORM can abruptly replace a sunny Kenmare day with gale-driven rain that renders umbrellas useless and gives Ireland its reputation for capricious rotten weather, my feelings of peace were punctuated by moments of sudden dread. Now and again, an out-of-the-blue fear of the mailman reminded me of the bad old days. If I caught a stranger on the street eyeing me with what I considered unseemly curiosity, a bolt of familiar panic would seize my viscera and make my hands go icy cold. Even when I heard the rare burst of local police car sirens, however different they sounded from the wailing music of their counterparts in the States, a sour taste rose into my mouth, the acid taste of guilt I suppose one might say.

  And yet most of the time I found relief in forgetfulness about my past. An ocean did, after all, separate me from my former life. Whatever bad things I had or hadn’t done were behind me now, so I reassured myself. At night, in our warm bed, while listening to Meghan softly breathing in her sleep and watching the constellations wheel with magisterial slowness and godly indifference across the black sky outside our window, I reasoned there was no further need to worry about anything. A year and a half had clocked by since Adam’s death, and the murder case was as cold as the bl
ack interstices between the stars above. Atticus Moore, true to his word, sent along the occasional check for my share in the books I had consigned him, always with a brief and upbeat note that never once suggested he’d run into any problems with the works I had forged. Slader had, it seemed, disappeared back into the rotten woodwork from whence he came.

  Taking advantage of Meghan’s birthright, we had filed our papers and were able to take part-time jobs, as much to get ourselves more involved in our adopted community as to earn any wage. Meghan clerked in the local bookstore, well stocked with Irish history and literature, maps, and, yes, art- and cookbooks. Myself, I found work in a stationer’s that had a nifty letterpress printing shop in the back, complete with a Vandercook proof press I was eager to learn to operate. Each of us was in our element. With this litany of reassurances, I would shut my eyes and drift into a dreamless sleep. Looking back on this calm period in my life, I wonder if dreams during sleep were unnecessary. I was already living a dream every waking hour, despite the occasional dark cloud of fear that came over me, the understandable fear this all might be somehow taken away.

  News that would forever change my life, news that was every bit as unexpected as receiving a Henry James letter in the mail or a policeman’s knock on the door but that carried none of their calamitous misfortune, came on a nondescript Sunday morning several months into our Kenmare sojourn.

  Meghan and I, inveterate early risers, always slept in late on Sundays. We tried never to make plans that would involve anything other than a nice, lazy start to the day. Scrambled eggs and blanched cherry tomatoes, rashers, some black and white puddings, fresh coffee, the newspaper—this was our idea of perfection. So I was taken aback when I awoke on the second Sunday in August to find that my wife had gone downstairs and started what was to be a surprise breakfast. Wasn’t my birthday. Wasn’t any day I could remember as being special. Drawn by the smell of ground espresso beans, I put on my robe and went down to join her.

  “What’s up?” I asked. “We win the lottery?”

  “Here,” she said, and handed me a glass of orange juice.

  “Well, did we?” taking a sip.

  “You might say we did,” was her response. “Sit. Let’s eat.”

  Though I was keen to know what was going on, I played along and asked no further questions. We were halfway into our breakfast when Meghan set her fork on her plate and said, without any prefatory comment, “I’m pregnant.”

  Beside those words and the look on the face of the woman who uttered them, I had neither heard nor seen anything more moving in my life. Without a sound I got up out of my chair, rounded the breakfast table, and took Meghan into my arms. After all the heartache she had suffered and courage she’d shown, it was as if a sluice gate inside her had opened, allowing a flood of tears to come forth. I kissed her moist eyes, held her close, told her we would do everything in our power to make this the happiest, healthiest, wisest, most coddled baby ever. I couldn’t remember being so lighthearted, so rapturous, even during the bygone times when the act of forgery produced similar feelings.

  The rest of the day swung back and forth from unfettered giddiness to a more mature conversation about whether we needed to find new lodgings, if we were absolutely certain we wanted to raise our boy or girl in rural Ireland rather than New York, how long Meghan would continue to work at the bookshop, and so forth. Despite our dizzy glee over the prospect of raising a child together and probably not being in the proper state of mind to make rational decisions, most of what we settled on would prove to be the way we later agreed things should go. There was plenty of room in the furnished cottage we’d leased. Besides, we liked it here. The grove of soughing pines that edged the field behind the house, the dancing creek nearby, the house itself with its thatched roof and cozy fireplaces—what child wouldn’t want to grow up in such an idyllic environment as this? Manhattan wasn’t a place that drew us much at all anymore and, unbeknown to my wife, of course, it wasn’t a place I might ever like to set foot in again, if I had my druthers.

  “Can I put in a couple of name requests early?” Meghan asked that afternoon as we walked arm in arm after taking a drive over to Bantry Bay to watch the rollers come in and the fishing boats bob like carved and painted corks atop the heavy swells.

  “You bet,” I said.

  “Well, okay. If it’s a girl I want to name her after your mother, Nicole.”

  “She’d have been very honored. And if it’s a boy?”

  “If it’s a boy, and you don’t have any objections, I’d love to name him Adam.”

  I could easily come up with any number of objections to naming our son Adam, not the least of which would be, Why drape the albatross of a murdered man’s name over the shoulders of our son? Instead, I simply said, “That sounds fine, great. I thought you were going to say William Butler.”

  “Well, it could be Adam William Butler, or William Butler Adam, you know.”

  “Fortunately, we have months to settle on names. Right now, I couldn’t even tell you my own name. I love you, Meghan.”

  “And I love you.”

  The rest of August floated by without incident as summer gave way to early fall, and the throngs of tourists—Americans, Japanese, Germans—passing through on their way to visiting the Ring of Kerry were now thinning. Then, no warning, it was as if my life simply collapsed in on itself like a sheet of paper wadded into a ball. Walking home after an evening pint in my favorite pub in the village, far up at the top of the street, I could swear I saw Henry Slader looking me right in the eye before ducking around the corner. Rather than reverse course to take an alternate route home, I found myself half-running up the block, pushing my way past other pedestrians, cursing under my breath. Those nights of lying awake, mentally parading through a host of ways my current Eden could witness a second fall had, it seemed, not been altogether a fool’s game.

  Naturally, ridiculously, when I made it to the corner he was nowhere to be seen. It reminded me of that awful moment in the Armory when I glanced down for a moment and he vanished before I looked back up. Yet he wasn’t some ghostly magician or supernatural revenant. Quite the opposite, Slader had proven himself to be very much of this world, a man capable of all manner of very ugly, very human desires and faults. Hadn’t he said we were done when I handed over, to the last dollar, the money he demanded and his now-second-rate cache of fake Conan Doyle letters? Didn’t the man have anything better to do than harass me, someone who had treated him fairly, honored my end of the bargain?

  Like a puppet on a string, I marched along the sidewalk that paralleled the main road, moving quickly in the direction I thought I had seen him headed. After a minute of frenzied searching, I stopped to catch my wheezing breath—it seemed I had developed a mild case of asthma since moving to this rainy clime. As I stood there, homeward-bound cars coasting along the roadway and some of the same people I had jostled past now overtaking me, I began seriously to doubt myself. If it had in fact been Slader, he wouldn’t have bothered to run away from me, would he? What would be the purpose of such evasion at this point in our, granted, bizarre and unsavory acquaintance? An uneasy sense of calm came over me as I reasoned with myself, breath slowing, that there are more doppelgängers running around out there than any of us dare imagine. This was not my Henry Slader, not here in faraway County Kerry, in a little village tucked away down near the bottom of the isle of Eire. It was, instead, pure paranoia.

  Determined not to let this hallucination overcome the calm my life had settled into, I returned to the cozy comfort of the pub, called Meghan at work, and asked her if she’d like to come along and join me for some mutton stew, maybe a bit of trad music. Just because we were married and pregnant didn’t mean we couldn’t have some good distracting fun. My nerves needed another pint or two, although of course I didn’t dare tell her why. She was delighted at the idea, and once the bookstore closed—it stayed open an hour later than the stationery shop—she came straight over and we had a fine night
of it. Despite the age-old “Guinness is good for you” myth that suggested even pregnant women in need of health-giving iron benefited from drinking stout, Meghan refrained. But her high spirits belied her sobriety. She laughed and clapped and sang along with some of the songs she knew. Myself, I deliberately pushed my preposterous Slader lookalike out of mind and listened to the singers play guitar and tin whistle, fiddle and bodhrán for a couple of hours. For all the glow I got on, I reminded myself I was an expectant father now. The kind of man I would want raising my child was not one who would glance at faces around the room with a bugbear foreboding. Rather, it would be my job to explain away hobgoblins, gremlins, ogres, and all the other assorted harmless monsters that hide under beds—not to be living in fear of them myself. If my years as a forger were truly behind me, as now they had to be since I was no longer an adult child who felt it was all right to do whatever I pleased and damn all, I knew I must change. Change now, change categorically, change for good.

  Our bill settled, we left the pub to find a misty, starless night outside that was not at all cold. The colorful lights of other pubs up and down the main block were reflected in pools of rainwater on the narrow street.

  “Shall we walk home?” she asked.

  “And leave the car where it’s parked?”

  “Sure, why not? It’ll be safe, no problem. I locked it.”

  “Well, walking’s what I originally intended.”

  “So you said. No reason not to follow through. We can leave a little early and walk back in the morn.”