The Perfect Fake

by Barbara Parker

  “Just keep it pointed toward the lighthouse on Key Biscayne.” Tom opened a beer and leaned back on the bench seat, feeling the warm salt air on his face.

  What would happen with him and Allison, he didn’t know, but so far it was working out. She had passed the bar, and he still had his graphic design business. Now that his record had been cleared, it was easier to find work. He didn’t mind having a rich girlfriend as long as she didn’t remind him of it too often.

  “You want to take the wheel back?” she asked. He shook his head and closed his eyes. “You drive.”

  Acknowledgments Authors seldom know where the next idea is coming from, so we keep our antennae up. Over lunch one day, a new friend mentioned that she and her husband collected antique maps. She told me about a 1507 atlas of the world recently purchased by the Library of Congress for ten million dollars. As a mystery writer, naturally my first thought was, “Well, that’s something worth killing for.” My friend continued to talk about maps, and I felt the familiar flutter in my chest that signals a story just over the horizon.

  For setting me off on this voyage of exploration, I must thank Lorette David. She invited me to the Miami International Map Fair, where I met her husband, Bob David, who is even more of a map fancier. They introduced me to an eminent map expert in Miami, Dr. Joseph Fitzgerald. He helped me invent an Italian Renaissance cartographer, Gaetano Corelli, then sent me to the Historical Museum of Southern Florida, where curator Rebecca A. Smith and her assistant, Dawn Hugh, let me go through the map collection.

  With my plot still unformed, Bob and Lorette arranged a visit to the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., where Dr. John R. Hèbert, chief of the Geography and Map Division, generously shared his time. Dr. Hèbert set me straight on my plan to have someone in the story sell a forgery to the LOC. “Very unlikely,” he said, and sent me to talk to Heather Wanser, an expert in the Library’s Conservation Division. Heather then introduced me to Cindy Ryan, a scientist in the document testing laboratory. I quickly realized there wasn’t much chance of fooling any of them with a fake.

  At the Library, I was taken on a tour inside the vault, the fortified room where our nation keeps its most precious cartographic treasures, including globes hundreds of years old and rare maps of unique beauty, printed onto vellum or laid paper, hand-painted in full color, and touched with real gold. John W. Hessler, a brilliant cartographic technician, turned history into suspense stories, sparking my imagination.

  It took several more weeks to get my story under full sail. I corresponded with Kirsten A. Seaver, who had written a nonfiction book about an infamous fake, the socalled Vinland Map. Deciding that a hand-drawn map would be too difficult for my purposes, I researched copperplate techniques online and found Evan Lindquist, an artist and expert on intaglio engraving and printing. He supplied details of the antique printing press, the ink, and the technique for re-creating Corelli’s 1511 masterpiece, the Universalis Cosmographia.

  But first the original map had to be transformed into a digital image, and for that, credit goes to my son, James Lane, who works in graphic design in New York City. He gave Tom Fairchild his ability to join modern computer technology with Renaissance cartography.

  I am also indebted to John Prather for his comments on the Department of Corrections in Miami; and to attorney/mystery author Milton Hirsch for suggesting Leo Zurin; and to Sallye Jude and Jane Caporelli for their observations about overdevelopment along the Miami River.

  If Allison Barlowe speaks Italian, she learned it from my friend in Italy, Grazia Guaschino. Grazia’s charming husband, Guido Grenni, supplied photos of the train station in Turin and played the part of the curator of maps from the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze. Grazie mille to Loredana Giannini, who lives in Florence, for a glimpse of the interior of the library.

  Writer Christine Kling, who knows her way around a boat as well as a mystery novel, gave Tom Fairchild his sailboat and made sure he could handle it.

  A final thank-you to my editors at Penguin, Julie Doughty and Brian Tart, and to my agent, Richard Curtis, for encouraging me to take a vacation from my longrunning series and chart a new course.

  For more information and links about the fascinating world of rare maps, please see the links on my Web site, www.barbaraparker.com.