The Perfect Fake

by Barbara Parker

  She would have to call Larry. She would go down to the gift shop or her car to get something she’d forgotten, and she would call him. Larry had his own interests, but they were linked as tightly with hers as two sides of a coin. She would tell him what had happened, because he should know, but it wouldn’t change anything. They would have to continue as planned. Really, there was no choice.

  Chapter 21

  Eddie Ferraro lived in a narrow, four-story yellow building among a jumble of pastel blocks pressed tightly together on a promontory that overlooked

  the Ligurian Sea. His great-uncle made wine in the basement, and at street level, a cousin owned a bakery. Eddie’s apartment took up the third level, and wooden stairs led to his workshop, where he printed and framed handcolored sketches of the five villages of the Cinque Terre. In winter, when the tourists were gone and most of the shops were closed, Eddie helped patch the roof, paint the wooden shutters, or clean out the vineyards that terraced the brown, winter-dead hills. He would sit in a bar and watch the little fishing boats go in and out of a harbor so small they had to haul the boats up with winches and swing them out of the way.

  Eddie had never seen Italy or spoken the language until he jumped bail on a counterfeiting charge and arrived in Manarola with $822 to his name. He confessed there wasn’t much to do in this town; he was glad for the distraction of helping Tom Fairchild duplicate an old map with three bullet holes it in, and splatters of blood across five continents.

  While Tom loaded software onto his new notebook computer and brought up the scan of the 1511 Universalis Cosmographia, Eddie unrolled the real thing on the other end of the long wooden table. He weighted the corners with bags of lead shot and leaned over the map with a magnifying glass. Four years of walking up and down hills had made him thinner, and his hair had gone gray at the sides. He wore a green sweater with a hole in one elbow and jeans so old the hems had frayed. Tom thought that if Rose were here, she would reach for her sewing basket.

  “This is doable.” Eddie moved the glass across the map. “Clear, strong lines. Not a lot of cross-hatching and shading. I’m talking about the printing. The rest of it... that’s your department. You’re the artist, not me.”

  On the drive from Torino, Tom had filled Eddie in on the map’s history, from its publication in an atlas in Venice, which then passed through the hands of merchants and minor royalty in Genoa, Milan, and Constantinople, then to a Socialist-era museum in Latvia, the last place the atlas had been seen. The thief broke the binding and sold off the maps. The world map eventually ended up in an attic in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where Stuart Barlowe had found it.

  At dawn, Allison noticed Eddie’s head drooping and volunteered to drive. While Eddie slept in the backseat, she told Tom that there were no police cars patrolling Italian highways. The speed limit was left to the common sense of the drivers. She floored it. They stopped only once, at an Esso autogrill to fill up the tank of the elderly Lancia, sixty euros, and to buy cappuccinos and croissants. Arriving in Manarola, they parked at the bottom of a hill and dragged the suitcases another hundred yards up the steep, cobbled streets past people going in the other direction. It was Sunday morning, and bells were ringing in the twelfth-century Chiesa di San Lorenzo. Eddie gave his room to Allison, put Tom on the sofa, and stretched out on a cot in his workshop.

  Now the sun slanted through the windows, warm enough to imitate spring. There was no snow on the ground, and the clouds had blown out to sea. Allison had left an hour ago for a walk, accompanied by one of the kids in the family, to make sure she found her way back through the maze of streets. Tom, stuck behind his computer, had asked Allison to take some photos. It could be the only chance he got to see past the walls of Eddie’s workshop.

  “Let me show you the kind of plates we’re using.” Eddie crossed the room to some shelves and came back with a flat piece of steel about eight inches by ten. The surface was covered with a thin layer of opaque polymer.

  “This one’s a throwaway,” he said. “Here, you can hold it. I’ve done etchings—plenty of them—and the beauty of this is, no toxic chemicals. Basically, we’re going to print your digital image of the map onto a transparency, lay it over a plate, and expose it to UV rays for five or ten minutes. I’m building a UV light box, but heck, you could even set it out in the sun. The polymer hardens where the light hits it. The rest you can wash away in tap water. Presto. You put the plate into a press, ink it, add the paper, and you’ve got what it took Gaetano Corelli weeks to do. He’d wet his pants if he could do a copperplate engraving that fast.”

  “Fantastic,” Tom said, turning the plate over in his hands.

  “I had to special-order the big ones from a wholesaler in Berlin, cost me a hundred euros each, plus shipping. I bought six, which gives us a few to mess up. They’re going to a print shop in Firenze, arrival on Wednesday. We’ll run over there and pick them up. It’s a couple of hours by car. The same printer can work with a CD and give us a transparency. We can either come back here and prepare the plates, or take all our equipment to Firenze. I’d rather do it here, then go back for the printing.”

  “Fine with me. What about the ink? Where will you get that?”

  “On the balcony. Take a look.”

  Tom got up and opened the door. An old wooden table was out there, and on it, a dozen or more oil lamps. Eddie had rigged up a box frame with a piece of thick glass inside, which he had suspended about a foot over the lamps. Soot blackened the glass chimneys and the glass over them. “Might as well fire ’em up.” Eddie struck some kitchen matches and adjusted the wicks until the smoke rolled around inside the frame and drifted over the metal railing of the balcony.

  “You see why I don’t do this indoors. My neighbors think I’m pazzo.” Eddie made a circle next to his head. “Loony tunes.” He left the door open a crack to keep an eye on things.

  Tom was skeptical. “Is that going to work?”

  “Heck, yes. In the old days you might make it with burnt bones or grape vines, but lampblack’s just as good. It’s a damn good thing this isn’t a manuscript map, because you’d have to make ink out of gall nuts and gum arabic and whatever, and it would take weeks. Engraver’s ink is a piece of cake.”

  He showed Tom a jar half full of black powder. “I’ve been scraping soot off that glass for three days. By the end of the week, we’ll have more than enough. I’ll mix this with some ready-made burnt-plate oil. That’s mostly boiled linseed oil. I could make it myself, but I don’t want to blow the roof off my house. The ready-made will work. There’s not going to be anything in this ink, or in the paper, that wasn’t around five hundred years ago. So unless Stuart Barlowe runs the map through a spectrograph, and maybe not even then, there is no way he’s going to tell.”

  At the table Eddie touched the map with the backs of his thick, callused fingers as gently as touching a woman’s cheek. “We’ve got eleven sheets of paper coming from an antique dealer in Milan. You wouldn’t trust him with your house keys, but he knows paper. He won’t tell me where he found it, except that it’s blank end pages, Italian in origin, from atlases or folio-size manuscripts dating from the early sixteenth century. The color varies. We’ll have to match the original as best we can. We have to check the absorption rate, too. Ink can spread more on one piece of paper than another. I’m going to have to clip a corner off this map so I can test it. Is that okay with you?”

  “Do what you have to. How much was the paper?”

  “Three hundred euros a sheet.”

  “Jesus.”

  “This guy is reliable,” Eddie said. “If he says sixteenth century, you’re not getting a blank sheet out of a Currier and Ives book. I have a buddy in Firenze who can put us into a shop with a press from the late seventeen hundreds. The technology didn’t change from the time of Corelli. The press is one of those kinds with two big rollers.” Eddie tugged at the spokes of an imaginary wheel. “Hard as hell to pull and slow as the devil, but it leaves a plate impression on the p
aper that you just can’t fake. It’s going to be beautiful.”

  “How much do I owe you so far?”

  “I’ve paid out about four thousand euros, with another thousand to come. This is busting my savings account, so I need the money back pretty quick.”

  “No problem. I can probably do a wire transfer online. You want to write down what I owe you? I’ve been paid ten thousand dollars in fees so far. Half of that’s yours, but I had to spend it getting here.”

  “We’ll settle up later on the fees.” Eddie gave Tom a firm pat on his shoulder. “Show me that fancy computer of yours. Can you imagine going back a hundred years with that and a color laser printer? You could have turned out greenbacks like confetti. No, no, I’m out of that life, Tommy. I’m just saying, it would have been quite something to see.”

  Tom had already opened the file in Illustrator. The scan was so large he could only pull up a fraction of it on his computer’s seventeen-inch screen. “What you’re seeing is just one piece of the map,” he said. “It’s a lumbering giant. It takes ten minutes to open the whole file, so I cut it into a grid. It’s all mathematics, so I can put it back together later. Looks like we’re on the coast of North Africa.” Tom pointed at the screen. “See that dark brown in the upper right? That’s dried blood. You can just make out what’s underneath. Watch. I’m going to put a transparent layer over the bitmap and trace the line.”

  Using a tool in his program, Tom zoomed in on the square until the fibers in the paper were visible, and a shadowy image of coastline appeared under the bloodstain. Using the pen on his wireless tablet, he drew a smiley face on the map.

  “Should I leave it there? Maybe not.” Tom made the face disappear, then drew an S-curve. “Is that too thin? I can make it fatter. Or thinner. You see? The bullet holes will be easy to fix, but I’ll have to fill in the empty spaces with something. Luckily they missed the cartouche. Under the bloodstains there are some places I can’t make out. That’s why I ought to look at the Corelli maps in the National Library—to see what place names he used in other maps and use them for this one. It’s not going to be difficult, but it is time-consuming. It’s a bitch, if you want to know the truth.”

  Eddie leaned against the table with his arms crossed. “Do you think you’re being paid enough?”

  “Fifty grand is a lot of money. Or twenty-five, because I owe you half.”

  “Think about it, Tom. This map seems to drag a lot of bad luck around with it. A man was shot to death holding it. Your friend Jenny was working for him. You’ve got some guys on your tail and you don’t have a clue why. Who are they? Are they the ones who murdered Jenny Gray? Did Larry Gerard send them? I’m not sure you’re getting paid enough for the risk you’re taking. As for me, heck, I’m ecstatic with twenty-five. You didn’t have to pay me anything. I told you, I’ll do it for the pleasure of seeing you again after four years, my friend.”

  “We’re splitting the fee,” Tom said firmly. “Okay, sure, I’m a little jumpy because of what’s going on, but I can’t see how Stuart Barlowe is involved. I made a deal with him, and I’ll stand by it unless something changes.”

  “All right. It’s your decision, and I’m with you. Here’s some two-bit advice. Keep looking around for that dirt on Barlowe. If things work out like you expect, you won’t need to use it, but if he leaves you hanging, you’ll have a way out.”

  A woman’s voice called up from the street. “Hello–o-o-o.”

  Eddie went to the window. “Guess who?” He pushed the window open on its hinges and waved. Tom leaned out beside him. Allison was down there with a little boy about eight years old. They would have to climb the steep steps in the alley to come around to Eddie’s street.

  Her red beret was a dot of color on the gray stones. She pointed to the balcony. “I thought it was a fire. I see now. It’s lamps! What are you doing?”

  Tom called down, “Eddie is pazzo! He’s crazy. Come up.”

  She took a bottle from a brown bag and showed them. “Limoncello! Lemon liqueur. The lady in the gelato shop makes it. It’s delicious.” Motioning to the boy to follow, she walked out of sight, clomping up the hill in her heavy shoes.

  “She’s a funny girl,” Eddie noted. “What’s going on with you two?”

  “Nothing.” Tom amended, “Nothing yet.”

  “Don’t miss your chances when they come along.”

  “Are you talking about Allison? Or Rose?”

  Eddie closed the window against the cold air. “How’s she doing, really?”

  “She doesn’t have anyone in her life, if that’s your question. Why don’t you call her?”

  He shook his head. “What good would it do? I’d start wishing for things that aren’t going to happen. I can’t go back to Miami, and she can’t come here.”

  “She could visit, if you wanted her to.”

  “I don’t want her to. It’s too far and too expensive, and she ought to spend the money on the girls.”

  Tom went over to his messenger bag, where he had stashed his address book. “I forgot to give you something. Rose wanted me to bring it to you. The water got to the edges, but I dried it out.”

  He gave Eddie the photograph that had been stuck to the refrigerator in Rose’s kitchen. Rose and Megan and Jill with their arms around each other. Eddie looked at it for a while and straightened a bent corner. “It’s fine. They look very happy. Thanks.”

  Tom heard a door close in the apartment below. Allison’s voice came up the stairs. “I’m back. Do you guys want to try the limoncello?”

  Eddie was lost in the photograph.

  Tom leaned over the railing. “Yes! I’ll be right there.” He turned on his cell phone and set it on the table within Eddie’s reach.

  “I just dialed Rose’s number. It’s ringing.”

  Eddie looked startled. “Don’t do that. Come on. She’s probably in bed asleep.”

  “It’s not even nine o’clock in Miami.”

  “What would I say to her?”

  “Pick it up, you coward.”

  Eddie reached out, took it, then, with a glance at Tom, turned away for some privacy. As Tom went down the steps, he heard him say. “Rose?...Yeah, it’s me. How’re you doing?”

  It took a day to reconstruct the areas destroyed by the bullet holes and obscured by blood. Working on such small pieces of the map, Tom had to glance at the original every so often to remember where he was. Eddie had pinned it to a board, which sat on an easel next to the table. The next day Tom started tracing the existing lines in the map. It was tedious work, recreating every line in the map, every letter and number, every dot that marked a town, every coastline and river. He had to make them all a minuscule fraction thinner than the originals, to allow for the bleed—the fact that the ink, under pressure, would expand farther than the etched grooves in the plate. If the engraving were made from only the scanned map, the lines would come out a hairsbreadth too wide in the print. It was worth fifty thousand dollars, plus expenses, to give Barlowe what he wanted: perfection.

  Barlowe had been calling; Tom had let Allison deal with him. Barlowe had told her he’d flown to Milan and he would like very much to know where they were. Good old Allison had repeated what Tom had told her to say: Dad, I’m sorry, Tom doesn’t want to be disturbed.

  With his headphones on, Tom listened to music he had downloaded to his iPod using Eddie’s Internet connection. At sixty gigs, the iPod would store not only the map files but a staggering amount of music as well.

  In a detached mental zone produced by the music and the boredom of tracing one line after another, Tom had been thinking about Stuart Barlowe, wondering what Royce Herron had known—the dirt, the scoop, the inside information. All Tom had to go on were a few words Jenny had overheard: I know about you....I know the truth....You can’t hide it any longer.

  The judge hadn’t been on the inside of Barlowe’s corporation, so he wouldn’t have been aware of any financial crimes. He’d known about Jenny’s affair with Barl
owe, but he wouldn’t have talked about it. Royce Herron had been born in another time, and men in those days had a sense of honor.

  Tom’s pen came to a stop on the sketch tablet as he stared past the screen. Barlowe’s secret didn’t have to be something recent; it could have happened in the past. Royce Herron had known Stuart Barlowe for many years. He and Barlowe’s father had attended a Toronto map conference together in the late 1960s.

  Allison had talked about her family, mostly complaints, when she and Tom were dating. She had never known her mother, who died soon after Allison was born. Her father remarried a divorcée with a son when Allison was still very small. Stuart Barlowe inherited a Canadian company worth multimillions from his father. There had been two brothers, Stuart and Nigel. Tom remembered the name from the back of the old photograph that Judge Herron’s son had found in his father’s study and had given to Rose.

  The music in Tom’s ears suddenly stopped when the headphones were lifted off his head. Allison had come upstairs. She swung her hair out of the way and put one of the headphones to her ear. “Nice saxophone. Who is it?”

  “Sonny Rollins. I snagged it off the playlist of a buddy of mine in Miami.”

  Allison moved to the music as she looked over Tom’s shoulder at the screen. The islands of Japan reflected in her glasses. “My father called again. I told him you’re working very hard, and the map is coming out great. But he wants to see you.”

  “No,” said Tom. “I can’t take the time. If I’m not back in Miami soon, the Weasel will have my ass in jail.”

  She put the headphones down, and her face grew serious. “You have to, Tom. I told him we’d be in Florence tomorrow, and he wants to talk to you. No, really, you have to. I’m supposed to pay you another fifteen thousand dollars on your fee on Thursday, and he refuses to authorize it unless he’s satisfied how things stand with the map.”

  Tom had been working without a break, because nothing would get done the day they went to Florence. He would take photographs of the Corelli maps in the library while Eddie picked up the plates and the antique paper. After that, they had to go over to the print shop and do a couple of test runs on the old press. Wasting an hour or two with Stuart Barlowe was not in the cards.