The Forger's Daughter

by Bradford Morrow

  “Yours?” I said, smiling at his audacity.

  “The far more immediate concern is where’s your Tamerlane? You know, in the scheme of things, it’s as important as the genuine article.”

  “Scheme of things,” I scoffed, knowing it was useless to rebuke him any further for trespassing. The man was immune to such criticisms, and knew full well I wasn’t about to report him to the authorities.

  “This is part of the reason I wanted your Nicole to deliver the goods. My sense of her is that she’s much more levelheaded than her father. But anyway, yes, scheme of things,” he all but hissed. “Abigail Fletcher returns tomorrow night from her vacay in France, and her lovely new Tamerlane needs to be tucked into its solander bed before then. Not that she’ll necessarily look for it, but one never knows.”

  I furtively scanned the bar—more packed with regulars and tourists up for the holiday weekend than when we last met—half hoping to see Ginger-head sitting there, morosely quaffing a beer.

  “If you’re looking for Cricket, his work was done so I sent him home.”

  Slader’s tranquil demeanor as he made this statement nearly convinced me that he was telling the truth, and that his platemaker or paper fabricator, or whatever it was Cricket did, was not the man in the detectives’ photograph. Otherwise, the word home was quite an icily diabolical euphemism.

  “I hope he got there safely,” was the best I could muster without opening up another line of inquiry I had no interest in pursuing.

  Ignoring me, Slader said, “I noticed you failed to autograph the original. Cold feet?”

  “You know as well as I do that would be a fatal mistake. In the scheme of things.”

  He rolled his eyes. “It would raise the value by a quarter million, easy.”

  “What it would do is invite such an array of klieg lights and criticism that my guess is it’d lower the value by that much, if not more,” I said, hearing the bone-dry authority in my voice, although not knowing with certainty I was right. “At auction previews, Poe scholars would come out of the woodwork to challenge its authenticity. I think there’s a strong chance it would have to be withdrawn from sale, or else, if it did go off, the thing might be bought in at the low reserve. Atticus knows as much, I’m sure.”

  “It was Atticus’s idea in the first place.”

  I took another swallow of whiskey. “I think you’re lying,” I countered. “Atticus isn’t that unsophisticated. But whoever came up with the idea, it’s a nonstarter.”

  Contemplatively, Slader drummed his fingers, again staring downward. “What about instead of Poe’s name, a simple inscription,” he proposed quietly, as if speaking to himself. “From the author, for instance. Or, With the author’s respects. That was done all the time during the period, as you know. It’s not like Jane Austen ever actually signed her name in any of her novels.”

  “You prove my point. Austen’s name was never even printed in any of her novels during her lifetime.”

  “Well, so, From the author.”

  “Look, it’s marginally better, all right?” I said, aware I was offering an opinion that might encourage him. “But if you’re married to the idea, it’s best you do the work. Trust me.”

  That brought a raspy chuckle from Slader. “Trust you.”

  “I’m like a magician who stopped doing his sleight of hand twenty years ago. I know the mechanics backward and forward, but the dexterity is lagging.”

  “Cry me a river.”

  “Poe autographs aren’t easy either,” I continued, disregarding his taunt. “It’s one thing to copy out a letter. If you mess up, you chuck it and do it again. But to risk ruining a seven-figure book with a botched signature?”

  “Your daughter’s up to it, though,” he said, tilting his head a little, looking at me hard.

  A knot cramped my stomach.

  “Oh, yes. A little birdie told me she was with you most of the time when you were working on the Poe book. If the birdie isn’t mistaken, it seems she had a hand—pardon my pun—in scripting the letter.”

  “Your birdie can go to hell.”

  Shaking his head, amused, he grew more serious. “I’m not married to the autograph, especially if it’s going to raise eyebrows. The idea was just to make it sufficiently different from the Fletcher copy that there’s no way she could claim it’s the same one, all right?”

  “I understand,” I said, rethinking my argument.

  “Let’s table that idea for the time being. Meanwhile, show me your Tamerlane already. If you did a good enough job, Abbie Fletcher won’t be of much concern to us.”

  I pulled out the plain rigid photo mailer in which I’d carried the forgeries of both book and letter. Pushing aside my drink to clear space, I set it on the small table.

  “You sure you want to look at it here?” I asked. “Light’s not very good, and what if somebody notices or, worse yet, spills their drink on it.”

  “Let me ask you a question,” he said. “Are you happy with the finished product?”

  Now it was I who chuckled. “Nothing about any of this makes me happy, all right?”

  “Tell you what let’s do,” a hasty smile revealing his chipped tooth. “Finish your drink and let’s go into the hotel library where we can have a look together. Nobody’s ever in there but bored children playing on the floor, and I didn’t see a single rug rat when I came down earlier—or, that is, when Cricket did—so we should have the room to ourselves.”

  “You said Cricket had gone home.”

  Shrugging, he paid cash for our drinks while I took my last sip of Jameson, realizing that he must be staying at the inn, maybe under Cricket’s name, rather than sleeping in the woods below my house. Who knew but that he’d been dividing his time. All I wanted now was for him to approve of the work Nicole and I had done—though I’d never admit her part—and for me to find out what was supposed to happen next. Move this along toward its endgame.

  Following him, I noticed he averted his face from the security cameras situated above the bar, so I did the same. We ducked through the doorway and entered the hotel lobby, which was blindingly bright by comparison with the pub. To our right were the registry and staircase. To the left of a large fireplace flanked by antique muskets on the wall was another doorway that gave on to the library. Despite its floral wallpaper, it was, I thought, perhaps the least lively library I’d ever set foot in, and quite appropriate for our unsavory needs. We made our way to a card table at the end of the room, beside a window, and sat next to each other. Without a word, Slader opened the mailer and gently pulled out the pamphlet and accompanying letter, then withdrew them from a Mylar sleeve like the one I’d used to protect the originals.

  “Nice touch,” Slader said, waving the sleeve in the air with a crisp plastic crackle. “Why shouldn’t these be treated with the same dignity as the others?”

  I couldn’t help feeling like a fidgety pupil whose homework was being scrutinized by the most loathed teacher in school. Preposterous image, to be sure. Especially when the fact of it was that I found myself sitting with a convicted felon, a violent criminal who was now intimately and expertly examining a professional forgery—hardly schoolboy stuff—that had been manufactured with felonious intent. I looked out the window facing the center of town, where people were going about their business, largely oblivious to how fortunate they were, warm sun on their faces as they strolled past the lush beds of flowers and ornamental shrubs in front of the inn. Slader was silent as he methodically paged through the Tamerlane. He’d pulled a flat flexible magnifier the size of a credit card from his wallet and lowered his head to where it almost touched the paper to get a closer view.

  Many minutes passed, and as they did I reflected on what a lonely trade it was to be a forger. The forger was customarily his own audience, with no one but himself to look to for praise or criticism, even for a simple acknowledgment.
Not unlike an unknown poet, though even the most obscure of poets can share verses with neophyte friends and fellow bards. It was such a rare moment, this, to sit with a respected, if hated, fellow counterfeiter and await an adjudication of the work my daughter and I had fabricated.

  When Slader finished, having at last studied the back cover by holding it up to a bar of sunlight and slowly tilting it back and forth to catch the sheen of the ink, or lack thereof, he set it down on the card table and said, “Superb, man.”

  I didn’t thank him.

  Next was the letter, about which I had more qualms, because naturally I’d had far less control over its production. Could a forger’s daughter, not even knowing with certainty she was making a forgery, produce an unsurpassable work—one that Slader, an artist near the top of our esoteric field, might sign off on? He held it up to the sunlight, then turned it upside down and squinted at the baseline and middle zones of the letters and words, their ascenders and descenders. He even touched the letter to his nose to make sure any ink smell was gone.

  “Well?” I said, impatient. “Good to go?”

  He looked me in the eye and nodded. “You’re a very intransigent person, my friend. You know that?”

  “So my wife tells me.”

  “First, where are the proofs and rejects? You were supposed to return them to me.”

  “I shredded them into confetti, then burned them. You want the ashes?”

  Ignoring my question, he continued, “Also, I’m not going to ask why your daughter didn’t change more of the text, because I don’t think it overly matters.”

  Horror-struck by his mention of Nicole a second time now, I considered contradicting him, insisting I’d done all the work myself, but thought it best to wind down our discussion. Anyway, for all I knew he had telephoto pictures of her scribing it in the middle of the night.

  “He sometimes didn’t, in point of fact,” I said.

  “Besides,” Slader continued, “since there aren’t to my knowledge any other surviving examples to compare it with other than Fletcher’s, it’s hardly a concern.”

  “Well, on that point we disagree,” lowering my voice as a hotel guest wandered into the room and, seeing there were only books and two preoccupied men here, left. “If Mrs. Fletcher hears the news, which she probably will, she’ll compare her letter with this one, which will surely be reproduced in the auction catalog, and red flags might rise.”

  Slader adjusted himself in his chair, ran a palm over his head. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe it would be best if the Tamerlane was discovered without any letter, and came to auction sans accoutrements, no autograph, just the pure goods—”

  “I never knew you had the capacity to listen to reason, but it’s heartening to see.”

  Ignoring me, he played out the rest of his idea. “It’s not like the letter couldn’t turn up later, all by itself.”

  “That would need a clever backstory—how it surfaced, naked and alone, after almost two centuries out of the public eye. Twinned with Tamerlane, it wouldn’t need explanation.”

  A genuine look of amusement broke on Slader’s gaunt face, prompting me to realize I was arguing both sides of the matter, and was doing it because I didn’t want Nicole exposed. But it was more than a little too late for that.

  “You know as well as I,” Slader said, “that forging plausible narratives to bolster our documents is half the joy of operating in the foggy heaths of history, imps of the perverse doing our thing, as Poe might’ve put it. We’ve claimed the right to revise the past as we see fit, and so we do. We change facets of the world to fit our own agendas. No big deal, and half the time we’re never even noticed. I’d go so far as to say half the time people don’t have any definite recollection of what actually did happen. Fact and fantasy carry equal weight, as far as I’m concerned.”

  Out of the blue, I told him, “You’re a strange guy, Henry. Not that I disagree.”

  He looked at the Tamerlane with a blank expression, then began to busy himself with putting it back in the sleeve. “I’ll take that as flattery, coming from the likes of you. But enough fucking around. I need to let Atticus know the work is done.”

  “Give him my regards,” I said, changing the subject. “Before everything went south, in no small part because of you, he used to be a friend.”

  “How touchingly sentimental,” said Slader. “Any bad blood between you is your fault alone. If you want to mend fences, why don’t you tell him yourself? He’s on his way from Providence. Should have been here by now.”

  Aware that my daughter was driving around Rhinebeck, waiting for me to finish, I checked my wristwatch, surprised at how late it had gotten. “That may have to wait for another time. Why’s he coming, anyway?”

  “Would you trust any of this to the post office?”

  “Understood,” I said. “So my part is done, right?”

  “Part of your part.”

  Though I knew it was coming, the way he uttered that quartet of words—stern but without inflection or the slightest pause—left me breathless. It reminded me once more, as if I needed reminding, that Slader had me in a lethal bind. If I wanted my life, and my family’s well-being, to return to how it had been before Maisie’s scream cut like a scythe through the tranquil evening air, I had no choice but to cooperate.

  “All right,” swallowing rather than speaking my two paltry words. “So you still intend to bring it to auction?”

  “We do,” he said, sliding the pamphlet and letter back into the stiff mailer.

  “Next year? Year after?”

  Defiant impatience spread across his face.

  Finding my voice again, I said, “I’d assumed you might want to give the Fletcher woman time to settle in with her new copy. Make sure no suspicions are raised.”

  Slader fully frowned at me, held up the mailer. “This is her Tamerlane, her Poe letter addressed to somebody whose name is slightly different from what she remembered—a difference the old girl will blame on the shortcomings of a faulty memory—and she’s going to be perfectly content with it, just like she was before.”

  “So what do you have in mind?” I asked, though wanting to flee Slader rather than hear any further plan that he, in his calm amorality, might hatch.

  “Atticus will be the final arbiter, but my understanding is that the book will need to be ‘discovered’”—he bracketed the word with finger quotes in the air—“within the next few days so it can go up for auction around the anniversary of Poe’s death.”

  Candid incredulity was what I felt. “Slader, get real. That’s early October. You don’t have any idea how impossible that would be to arrange on such short notice.”

  “The seventh, to be precise,” Slader said, rising from his chair. “Falls on a Sunday this year, so maybe you can schedule it for the Friday night before, in honor of Quarles”—the pseudonym Poe used when he published “The Raven.”

  I needed to get away from Slader so I could think. Standing, I found myself drained. “That would only make a tight schedule tighter. There’s not enough time to research, write, photograph, and print a new catalog for distribution by then.”

  “Maybe rival auction houses would have a different response, given how rarely this book surfaces. Commission’s not the only reward for handling it. The prestige—”

  “Don’t be presumptuous, Slader,” was my response to his empty threat. “I know how my business operates. Either way, I’d have to consult with the house. We could probably put out a press release, post the lot online, and print an addendum.”

  Rather than respond, he changed direction. “Look, this is good work, both book and letter. Atticus will have his own ideas how to proceed, and might agree with you—who knows? For me, the sooner it’s sold and profits divvied, the better. As for you, you should go find your daughter. I’ve seen her drive by here on West Market Street twice already,
and she’s probably getting worried. Pass along my compliments on her handiwork, if you will.”

  I didn’t dignify his remark with a response, but just asked, “When will I hear from you next?”

  “When you hear from me next.”

  That was enough of Slader for one afternoon, so I turned away and strode past the shelves of books that seemed to be a lending library of sorts, made up of tatty, well-thumbed volumes abandoned by transient visitors at the inn. They were, I mused, a sorry lot.

  Outside, I blinked in the strong afternoon sun and headed along Montgomery past the repurposed Baptist church and stately Victorian homes set back from the broken sidewalk, phoning Nicole as I made my way toward the county fairgrounds.

  “Done?” she asked, after the first ring.

  “In a manner of speaking.”

  “Tell me where you are and I’ll pick you up.”

  True to her word, she found me standing alone at the entrance to the grounds, where only a week before, thousands had converged to ogle champion cows and chickens, sheepshearing and tractor pulls at the annual county fair. Maisie used to be partial to pig races and caramel-covered apples but had lately outgrown such trivialities. Were the fair still going, I thought as I climbed into our minivan, I would have liked nothing better than to disappear into its old-timey diversions as a way of erasing Slader from memory.

  “Home?” Nicole asked, sensitive to my lousy mood.

  “First I’d like to go throw some stones in the river.”

  “In it, or at it?”

  “Either way works.”

  “That bad?”

  A fair question, I supposed, since the fact of it was that by committing a venial crime, with my daughter’s help, unwitting or not, I had lessened my exposure to the accusation of having perpetrated a mortal one before she was even born. A mortal one, I should add, that seemed no more tangible to me now than it did then, no more real. Intangible or unreal or whatever, it was nothing I could ever discuss with Nicole.