The Forgers

by Bradford Morrow

  I was in trouble now and knew it. For one last passing moment, I gave some thought to capitulating to Slader. In many ways, that would be the easiest course of action, although finding free time to work the press without either Eccles or Meghan questioning me would be difficult. It was true that some of Mr. Eccles’s wooden typecases held fonts that were punched in Irish and English type foundries at least a century ago, perhaps longer, and they would be ideal to use for the time period Slader had mentioned. And if he was providing the text, the paper, the ink, as well as offering to take the materials to market, my exposure and therefore my legal downside was limited, or so I told myself. The real problem was that I had made my wife a promise and just this once believed I ought to keep it, since what kind of a father would I become if I risked my son’s or daughter’s chances at a normal life, by which I mean a life in which their father wasn’t cooling his heels in prison? Besides, and this was the clincher I had to admit even to myself, my heart was not in it. My onetime love of the visceral act—I would sometimes find myself physically aroused when my hand, my pen, my paper were coordinating so perfectly that a kind of calligraphic, pornographic ballet took place before my eyes—had diminished. And just as feverish love inevitably cools, since otherwise lovers would never survive their own passionate fires, so did my obsession.

  As I locked the shop and made my way up the street to where I’d parked our car, I knew it was over. An essential and defining phase in my life was finished, gone, not to be rekindled or resurrected. Oddly, I felt freer than I had in years. Yes, I was worried about consequences, to be sure. But liberated. How I wished I could rush upstairs when I got home and tell Meghan that what she had always hoped for had finally come true. But she wouldn’t understand, since she’d believed all along that the poisonous worm that lived in my heart had been extracted and killed for the vermin it was. I didn’t want to explain that though it had been largely dormant, the monster still awoke now and then from hibernation and gnawed away at me, and perished at last only this afternoon. Strange that sometimes we must keep secrets that ought to be cried out from the mountaintops.

  MEGHAN JOINED ME FOR DINNER downstairs in front of the fireplace, where a peat brick softly crackled. I did my best to keep that warm feeling of liberation going, but as with all good things it soon enough faded. What I wanted more than anything was to sleep. My weariness over what had transpired since Slader’s unwelcome arrival in Kenmare had taken its toll. Sleep, a nice long dreamless sleep, was the sole cure for my fatigue, I knew. After setting our dirty dishes in the kitchen sink—they could wait until morning to be washed—we climbed up to the bedroom, changed out of our clothes, and slipped under the blankets. Outside the window, a cloud cover must have blanketed the sky, as I saw neither moon nor planets nor stars. I fell into a deep slumber, my body relaxing as I lay on my back like a newborn, arms at my sides, in a matter of a few tapering minutes.

  Next—not even next, abruptly now—I felt a harsh wetness, like broiling fire, as if my right hand by the bed’s edge had been thrust into thick scalding water, or else the lively orange lava of that flower-edged volcano I had imagined before. But when was this? How was this happening? Had time collapsed, imploded? I couldn’t really answer my questions, barely formulated, because this distracting fire now became icicle cold, or rather was at the same time dry-ice blistering frigid. A dream, a nightmare, I thought or supposed, as I gasped awake, choking in air like a drowning man, my eyes blinking in the darkness that seemed to be interrupted by a confined shaft of blue light shining on my body. But a dull crunch and a groan, or harsh guttural growl that came from outside my thoughts, my head, woke me fully and I knew, as my fingers burned again, that I was not dreaming. Two, three more muffled stinging blows to my right hand and I erupted into screams that were almost simultaneously joined by other screams, those of my wife, whose legs were kicking hard beneath the covers as if she were sprinting in place. None of us was speaking in any language.

  Instinctive as a trapped beast and with brutal force, I shoved at my assailant—a man was leaning over me, a barbaric grimace on his face faint in the soft sapphire glow of the tiny flashlight clenched in his teeth—but as I did I sensed my right and left hands were different. I must have known what had happened, although I behaved as if my right hand still had all its fingers attached and wasn’t mutilated beyond salvation, a stub of meat and bone soaked in blood with which I slugged him, glancing but distracting, before hitting him as hard as I could with my left. Meghan came flying past me in her soon-to-be-bloodied nightgown shouting words, or maybe they weren’t actual words but they conveyed her rage and terror, not to mention her courage, because she grabbed the man’s forearm before he could bring his—our, yes, our—cleaver down once more.

  If I fainted, and Meghan tells me I did, I don’t remember much about it. What I do recall before passing out on the floor next to the switch, which I flipped—the grounds around the house were abruptly bathed in light, which shone on the elaborate mess that was our bedroom now—was that I saw the look in Slader’s eyes, an ogre caught in the headlights, and understood that not only was he a madman but he had made a terrible mistake. He pushed Meghan aside, dropped the weapon, and, silent as a moth singed by the candle flame, hurried away. The ambulance and local police were at the cottage quickly, Meghan told me the next day when I, not unlike Adam Diehl before me, lay in a hospital bed, although not on death’s door or dismembered of my hands. Nor did Slader get very far before the County Kerry authorities took him into custody. Given he was sighted walking into a pub on the outskirts of the village, where he used a public restroom to clean himself up, it would seem that his attack on me had not been all that carefully thought through—although it is true he managed to thwart the security system, to my enduring chagrin and regret, by scaling an old vine slated for pruning along the side of the cottage, cat-burglar style, to a second-story window. Whether it was the blood on his clothes and face or else that wild look in the man’s eyes that I myself had seen before I collapsed, the pub owner phoned the authorities at once, and Slader was arrested on the spot.

  I did not lose my right hand. Not in its entirety. He managed to cut off my middle three fingers near the knuckle and my pinky at the first joint. Oddly, my thumb remained unharmed. I received excellent care but wonder whether, if we were in Dublin or New York or somewhere with a hospital that had specialists on call who could reattach severed digits, I might have had a hand whose fingers were present and to some degree functional. That wasn’t meant to be. Yet as bad as my injuries were, they could have been worse. As Slader would find out later, he hadn’t deprived me of the gift of writing. Presumptuous bastard acted on mistaken impulse hoping to end any chances that I might write my name again, or write anyone else’s name, by mutilating my right hand. I remembered, while recuperating, a cute mnemonic that one of my grade-school teachers taught us kids way back when we were learning right from left. She said, “If you write with your right, you’re left with your left.” Slader might have been instructed with that same little ditty. But since I wrote with my left, my right was wrong, as I believe my clever mother phrased it, or my father. Either way, thanks to Slader I would go forward in life as a bit of a grotesque. I would be one of those occasional people noticed on a subway platform or in a post office, awkwardly clutching the newspaper or an envelope, someone we feel a twinge of sorrow for, an ache of inspiration while witnessing their courage, and great gratitude that we weren’t encumbered with a similar disability.

  Pollock’s fresh interest in questioning Slader about the Adam Diehl case came as no surprise to anyone, least of all me and Meghan. I went out of my way not to implicate Atticus Moore, in part because Atticus had nothing to do with Diehl’s death. Naturally, pathetically, Slader, who had fingers to point with, pointed his at me, saying I was the one who slaughtered my wife’s brother. I have no doubt that while Pollock might have mistrusted me—he had, after all, also dragged me in for questioning more than once—he viewed Slad
er’s claims as convenient and self-serving, not to mention preposterous and, for any foreseeable future, unprovable. Of course, Slader faced more immediate charges and for those he would go to prison, at least for a while.

  Had he succeeded in killing me—though I’m not sure he had wanted to take my life—mine would have been a classic copycat murder. However, this is not what Pollock and many others believed, including Meghan and, over time, myself as well, since I preferred their narrative to the one I knew to be closer to the truth. Slader, in other words, had come after me in the same way he had poor Adam Diehl. One couldn’t buy better circumstantial evidence than that, and Slader, for all his entrepreneurial instincts, provided it gratis.

  Meghan and I went through a rough patch after the assault, my surgeries and rehab aside. I was finally forced to explain to her who Henry Slader was, no easy needle to thread and a task I needed to be careful about since the authorities were operating, like allergens, at the edges of our lives at that time. I gave Meghan as much as was necessary to satisfy her as well as the guards, as the police were called here, and hoped to let it go at that.

  “The main thing you need to understand,” I said, toward the end of one of our less than pleasant discussions on the subject, “is that Slader came after me not because I was doing any forgery but because I refused.” Lying in the hospital bed, having finished eating my paper cup of pineapple sherbert, I readjusted myself so I could look out the window at the bleak winterscape. In no mood to argue, I let out a resigned sigh.

  “I hate to say it,” Meghan responded, ignoring the plea inherent in my gestures. “Especially with you here in pain, in the hospital. But there are times I wish I never heard the word ‘forgery.’”

  “Meg—”

  “Forgery,” she spat out the syllables as if they were rancid shreds of gristle. “It’s the ugliest word in the language.”

  “Maybe what you’re really saying is that you wish you’d never met me?”

  “That’s not what I said, and it’s not what I mean.”

  I paused before telling her, “If I could go back and undo one thing in my life, it would be to tear out the page in the devil’s playbook that stipulated I would be interested in books, autographs, manuscripts, forgery.”

  “That’s just nonsense. You can have an enormous interest in books and loathe forgery. Most people I know do.”

  “You can, they can. I couldn’t. But,” holding up my bandaged hand for effect, “I’ve learned to, the hardest way possible.”

  I could read from the look—if looks were books—on her face what she was thinking. No, it was my brother Adam who learned the hardest way possible. Fortunately, she didn’t speak but instead reached out and cradled my left hand in both of hers. My wife and I loved each other, I knew, and this was just one more storm we would weather.

  “Let’s make a pact,” I said. “Let’s drop that word from our vocabulary.”

  “What word?” she asked with as straight a face as she could manage.

  I smiled, and deeply hoped I would be able to hold up my end of the pact.

  CHRISTMASTIME IS UPON US AGAIN, the holly-jolly season that New York excels at celebrating. A fresh snow muffles the city sounds, reminding me of a delightful moment in my childhood when my father pulled me along in a sled down the middle of our unplowed, snowbound street. Adorable Nicole is five now, my life’s joy and, along with Meghan, my reason to keep on breathing. After the break-in and attack that left me maimed for life, our homey cottage in Kenmare mutated into walls, floors, and windows we no longer recognized. Even the baby’s room, so lovingly decorated, was sullied. My security system, obviously a wasted effort to deflect the inevitable, was a bad joke in retrospect. And any sweet luster Eccles’s Vandercook once held was now tarnished. After my release from the hospital, Meghan and I realized we could no more live in a crime scene in Kenmare than we could have in Montauk. So it was we returned to the States, where I would continue my rehabilitation, and where, in February as it happened, Meghan gave birth to a healthy girl. We rented a walk-up apartment in the old familiar neighborhood near Tompkins Square, a few short blocks from Meghan’s old shop. Our baby daughter was doted on to the exclusion of almost everything else. It was fortunate we still had quite a bit of savings left to support our outsider lifestyle, nor did it hurt that Atticus sent along a sizable cashier’s check without an accompanying note but clearly meant to satisfy any debts, real or imaginary, and lock us into a mutually beneficial silence.

  Several weeks after we had settled into our new place and after the baby was tucked in and had fallen into her enviably rapt sleep, Meghan and I made love, silently but powerfully, the kind of intercourse that borders on religious communion. After her shuddering orgasm, she whispered to me she loved me and drifted immediately off to sleep. Me, I lay there, my heart slowing, my half-handed arm draped over my wife, hoping to join my family in dreamland. But insomnia got me by the throat, and once more I was captive to my night thoughts. Adam’s name had come up during dinner out of the blue, Meghan ruing the fact he had the sweetest niece in the world and what a crime it was that he never got to be her uncle. Just a mention in passing, not a long melancholy dialogue, but emerald-green arsenic to me nonetheless. It was surely that allusion that conjured him up, dead Adam’s beggarly ghost, as I turned away from Meghan and looked without focus into our darkened room. Over the years, I had rehearsed what went on the night he was murdered and had grown sick of thinking about it. Were I going to wend my way through it, frame by frame, once again, then this had to be the last time, I told myself. The last time, I demanded of myself.

  What had I done? By now the reality—that suspect word again—of the incident was so lodged in the receding past that I misdoubted my version of what happened and can no longer be sure whether or not my imagination has embellished things, erased this or that, revised, emended, amended, and so forth.

  Without much aforethought but driven by an ire I cannot fully understand, I recall getting my car out of the garage, a cheap monthly outdoor spot on the West Side with chain-link fences topped by razor wire, telling the indifferent attendant I would bring it back in a few days, needed to get some repairs done. This was not anything unusual. My car, a boxy old Volvo that looked like a Matchbox toy some fond child had pummeled with great enthusiasm into the playground gravel, was dated enough to be very used but not enough to be fancy vintage. Vaguely silver, an inheritance from my father that I didn’t drive much but couldn’t bring myself to sell, the car needed servicing, and servicing it got at a repair shop out in Sunset Park. I chose the place because it was cash only, under the table, or under the chassis as it were. Had the brakes and transmission checked, too. All was well, but even so I tipped the man who ran the shop, as obviously corrupt a human being as one might ever want to meet, five hundred dollars cash on top of what I owed him for the servicing, asking if he would mind if I left the car for a couple of days at his place.

  “Between garages and I don’t want to leave it on the street,” I explained, a nervous tremor audible behind my obvious falsehood.

  He glanced over at the Volvo then turned slowly back to meet my eyes, shrugging as if to say, Who you kidding, man, nobody would want to steal that beater.

  “I’ll have it out of here in a few days, promise.”

  After a pause, he asked, “Need to keep it out of sight? That’s another five.”

  “Out of sight would be good. But I may need to use it once while it’s here, so I’ve got to have access.”

  We discussed details briefly, and our handshake, solemn if idiotic, creditable if corrupt, sealed a pact that meant nothing happened here because, in fact, nothing had. I can still picture his ruddy pockmarked cheeks and handsome sloe expressive eyes. Were he married, which I’m sure he was, he was as unfaithful a husband as ever lowered his trousers.

  That night I had a quiet dinner with Meghan. Again, for reasons that elude me, assuming there was anything akin to reason involved in the first place, ours
was a memorably lovely meal. We splurged on a bottle of excellent Merlot, shared a T-bone steak with creamed spinach and potatoes au gratin. Back at her place—this was when we used to alternate apartments more often than we did after Adam died—we made love and slept together like two kittens might sleep, ridiculously warm and familiar. In the morning, I was up first and brewed our coffee. Meghan sleepy, Meghan with her red hair and pale full lips, coming from dreamland to life, from slumber to sentience, was a beautiful sight to see. I have no words for the wave of devotion, of affection and adoration, I felt when watching her wake up.

  Our talk that morning was no different from any other morning.

  “What are you up to today?” I asked.

  “Workaday workday,” she answered. “Nothing special. You?”

  “Same by me,” I lied.

  “See you later?” she asked.

  “You bet,” I said. “Go out or cook here or what do you want to do?”

  “Let’s cook in, your place. But just to remind you, I have to appraise a collection downtown so I can’t stay over.”

  I frowned, then said, “So you’d said. Not a problem.”

  We had, and I would contend still have, a solid and simple relationship. The problem was her brother. Her first-class freeloader, second-rate forger brother—not even worthy of the word “forger” since I now comprehended he was a dilettante scribbler at best and mostly a mere fence, a marionette who danced to Henry Slader’s pulled strings—who was doing everything to undermine our relationship.