The Ross Forgery

by William H Hallahan

  Suspect drove car to his garage next to his home, then went to a corner bar and remained for three hours drinking beer and talking to other patrons. He got into several loud arguments. Suspect gets very nasty when he drinks. Several men offered to take him outside for a fight. He walked home at 12:30 a.m. He sat at a drawing board making giant-size letters on an artist’s pad. Surveillance was broken off at 1:40 a.m. Reason: Subject fell asleep in his chair.

  Conclusions: Operative cannot explain actions. Two men stole paper and possibly other things from publishing company. It was a long ride to steal a small roll of paper. Neither man showed much professionalism in their breaking and entering. No smart burglar would have taken the unnecessary chances or made the noise they did. They were very lucky not to have been apprehended by the police. Philly police are generally known to be on the stick in such matters. Two dumdums.

  Operative’s Signature and Temporary License Number: Arthur Tank 090-8474-1777

  10

  The wind feebly flogged a branch of the sumac tree against the kitchen windowpane. Frail tapping, like an old lady’s hand.

  Ross stood by the sink, waiting for the water to drip through the coffee grounds, and idly scratched his unshaven throat. He scowled at the chitinous coating on the spring buds of the sumac branch.

  “Second chance,” he murmured.

  His wife looked up from the frying pan. “What second chance?”

  “I was thinking that trees get a second chance—a new chance every year.”

  She shook her head at him. “You get a new chance every day, Edgar.”

  He just shook his head at her back.

  The phone rang and he crossed to the living room.

  “Yuh.”

  “Ross?”

  “Yeah.”

  “This is Mike Townsend.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I put that paper sample under the microscope, and it looks pretty good. A combination of esparto and chemical wood fibers, about a fraction of an inch, and probably a north European spruce. I’m going to have it run through some tests in a lab over in Newark.”

  “Good, good. That sounds great.”

  “Well, we’ll see. Don’t get your hopes too high. Even if it passes the chemical tests, I still have to figure out how to age it.”

  “Got any ideas on that?”

  “Well, to tell the truth, I think I know how to do it. It’ll take some fairly simple equipment. But let’s wait for the lab tests. I should have the results late tomorrow afternoon. Then, we’ll see.”

  “Tomorrow afternoon?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You can’t get it any faster?”

  “That’s fast. Very fast.”

  “Yeah? OK.” Ross hung up and looked unhappily at the coffeepot. “Tomorrow. I’ve spent my life waiting for tomorrow.”

  The sumac branch tapped softly on the pane at him.

  11

  At 3:30, the section head of the Newark Airport control tower snatched a phone from its cradle and dialed a number.

  “Those goddamned dogs are on the runway again. Where? What do you mean, where! Look out of your window. Straight down the strip. See them? A string of them, loping across the field toward the Jersey Turnpike. And that’s that same Doberman leading them. You can patch that fence until your ass falls off. There’s only one way to get rid of them, and that’s with a gun!”

  He put the receiver back on its wall hook and focused a pair of binoculars on the dogs. As he watched, an airport jeep raced past the administration buildings to the fence along the turnpike, then turned and raced toward the dogs. The Doberman saw the jeep and turned to lope back across the field toward U.S. 1.

  12

  The airlines called it “Waiting for Spring.”

  The Madison A venue travel package included six days and seven nights under a tropical sun and a trade wind moon. The advertising trotted out palm fronds; sun-dappled waves; happy natives, thumping drums, eating fire, and dancing. Sex, sun, fun, food, liquor.

  Edgar Ross knew one man who had his own “Waiting for Spring” plans, and they didn’t include the ordinary tourist package. He sat at his drawing board with forty-eight pages of bus schedule galleys, set in miniscule type. Captured again by the Great Garlic Breath, while his india ink pens lay in their velveteen slots in the boxes in a drawer. Silenced thundersticks.

  By raising his eyes, he could look through the rilling shop window at the Mercedes parked in the downpour across the cobbled courtyard of the mews.

  Ross was weary of waiting. Waiting for the end of typesetting the bus schedules, waiting for Joe Jerk and his mistress to get into the Mercedes, waiting for the report on the paper.

  The trunk of the Mercedes would receive, as it had for each of the seven or eight vacations that year, a series of suitcases, six or seven that belonged to the girl. Usually the man carried two—one large, one small—flawlessly, exquisitely made of Spanish leather.

  The Mercedes looked like a jewel in the rain, regally indifferent to the shower, glistening in the wetness.

  The door opened at last. And the girl stood there, waiting, glancing unhappily at the rain. Her beauty was breathtaking.

  Ross felt again the ache in his throat as he studied her. He believed she had the most beautiful legs he had ever seen. Every time he saw her coming or going, her radiant beauty and open warmth unsettled him.

  Joe Jerk appeared and popped open a huge black bumber-shoot that he held up for her. She stepped out on the stone stoop, stepped down on the cobbled street, turned, and with the grace of a ballerina, coiled herself into the front seat of the car.

  Joe Jerk firmly shut the door and walked around to the driver’s door. Fat. Even through the custom-made suit, the roll of kidney fat and the bulge of sagged abdominal muscles showed.

  Ross rose. Always, all the resentment and thundering rage in Ross’s heart centered on the man. A klutz. A yo-yo. Stuffed with money. Spoiled by money beyond endurance. Injustice bloated and battened on lard, fat, the honey of the land. How come that fat bonehead lived beyond the wildest dreams of the emirs of old, capstoned with a breathtakingly beautiful woman whose legs could haunt the dreams of a desert eremite? How?

  The rage Ross felt blotted out the exquisite torture of the woman’s presence.

  Money. Money is everything, and I’ll have it. Suitcases full of it.

  Ross stripped the klutz of all his clothes and staked him spread-eagle to the ground under a tropical sun. Die. Die.

  Ross looked at his wife. Silently, she shook her head and went back to her bus schedule typesetting.

  “There’s a career for you, Kitty.” he said.

  Kitty turned and smirked at him. “Not for me. One day that girl is going to get up and see a wrinkle—around the eyes, or below the chin. One wrinkle and she’s dead.”

  “It’ll take more than one wrinkle to put her out of business.”

  Kitty smirked again. “Are you kidding? The day she sees that first wrinkle, she’ll know it’s only a matter of time before he sees it. Then it’s good-bye townhouse, good-bye furs and Paris frocks and seven yearly vacations.” She turned around in her chair and looked at Ross. “Tell you something else. You think she wants to go sit in the sun in Jamaica? She’s on duty. No fun. No sun. Sun ages skin, and that’s her stock in trade.” She swept a hand through air. “She can have it. She’s not going anywhere.”

  The three of them watched the Mercedes drive across the cobbled courtyard and down the flowing alley.

  “He can have what he has, too,” said Helen Ross thoughtfully. “He has to pay for everything he gets in hard cash. If he ever loses it, his life will be over.”

  Ross looked at her face in profile as she looked after the disappearing limousine. A portrait of the former Helen Seferis in dull rainlight.

  Ross sighed and looked at the clock. His whole future was inside a bunch of test tubes in a chemical laboratory in Newark.

  13

  Ross saw him first. He walked in the
rain, round shouldered, head down, hands in pocket, with a penguin gait. The familiar upbrimmed porkpie hat dismayed Ross.

  “Mr. Tank,” said Kitty cheerfully.

  Helen Ross looked up at the approaching figure, then turned and looked solemnly at her husband.

  “Walks like King Kong,” said Kitty. “I bet he can push trees over.”

  Ross sighed. “He’s very good at breaking things. Bones in particular.”

  Mr. Tank opened the shop door. The sizzling sound of the rain filled the shop, softening as the door shut. Arthur Tank looked at the three people, then gazed deliberately around the shop, noting, in turn, the job envelopes hanging on the pegboard, the calendars, specimens of new phototypography alphabets in various point sizes, and miscellaneous papers and equipment on the office work surfaces.

  He fixed his eyes on Edgar Ross and cleared his throat.

  “I hear you, Tank. I hear you.”

  “Can we talk somewhere?”

  “Talk where you stand, if you want, Tank. There are no secrets around here. Moose wants his five big big ones, doesn’t he?”

  Tank shrugged. “What can I say? You’ve been through this before.”

  Ross nodded and suddenly felt constrictions of fear in his stomach. What if that paper flunked the test in Newark? Five thousand dollars was suddenly an enormous sum. He looked at the squat neck below Tank’s face, and at Tank’s huge hands.

  Ross cursed the sullen fury that had led him to the frenzied gambling spree. “Tell him. Tell Moose—say I’ll have the money in three weeks.”

  Arthur Tank slowly shook his head.

  “Look, Tank, that’s a big bundle. Not just a couple of hundred. It takes time to raise it.”

  Tank nodded understandingly. “When?”

  “Two weeks.”

  “It was already a week yesterday.”

  “OK. Two more weeks.”

  Tank reflected. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other. He looked thoroughly soaked. “OK. Two weeks from today. Otherwise, you go with me to the loan shark.” He slowly unbuttoned his rain-stained coat and withdrew a pocket looseleaf. He opened it and turned several pages. He looked reflectively at a page, then reached back into his pocket for a wooden pencil. He made a notation and replaced both pad and pencil. Then he rebuttoned his coat, looking around the impedimenta of the shop curiously as he did so. He bobbed his head in the direction of the two women and stepped back into the storm.

  He strolled slowly back down the alley, head down, a solitary.

  14

  Ross looked down at his hands. Both fists were clenched. Clenched with anger. Clenched with fear. “Don’t look at me with those tragic Greek eyes,” he said. He heaved himself to his feet and went up to the kitchen for a can of beer.

  As he came down the stairs, Kitty held the phone out to him. “It’s for you. Michael Townsend.”

  He put it quickly to his ear. “Yeah. How did it go?”

  “Bad.”

  “Oh?”

  “Chemical tests prove conclusively that the paper was made recently. They even identified the country it was made in and the papermaking process that was used. It’s a washout.”

  “I’ll call you back later,” said Ross, and clapped the phone into its cradle.

  Ross felt briefly that he was going to go on a rampage and destroy his shop. His eyes darted around the room seeking a weapon. He even located the wooden lock-up mallet. But the energy drained away from him. He felt weak. Tired. Spent. All the fight was going out of him.

  He opened the shop door and stood in the doorway.

  His eyes looked at the flowing water on the cobblestones and his ears heard the thrashing of rain. He threw the empty can across the courtyard at Joe Jerk’s house.

  Helen Ross looked at him with her tragic Greek eyes.

  15

  Michael Townsend laid the typewritten report aside and looked out at the March rain. Down in the street, large puddles lay beaten with rain. He was thinking, trying to find a way out of the maze. Either a convincing counterfeit of paper or an actual undiscovered Wise opus. He glanced again at the rain. It was going to be a long, wet night.

  16

  The burnished brass plate on the door entrance said PIERPONT ARCHIVES OF THEOLOGICAL STUDIES.

  Michael Townsend pushed open one of the carved doors and entered a large lobby floored in parquet in a chessboard pattern. At the hand-carved oak reception counter was the sign LIBRARIAN. And in the slot provided was a name card: J Ambrose Whelkin.

  Mr. Whelkin looked at him solemnly, in silence, waiting with expectant eyes.

  “I’d like to consult a standard biographic directory for English clergymen around 1880, 1890.”

  “I see. Would a sort of interdenominational Who’s Who type of thing do?”

  “I suppose.”

  Mr. Whelkin nodded. He pulled open a library card catalog file drawer and quickly flicked through some cards. “Ah.” He jotted a number on a bit of paper and walked from behind the desk. “This way, please.” He lead Townsend into a library room. On the door, the sign said REFERENCE.

  Mr. Whelkin went quickly to the stacks, glanced at a shelf, and plucked a volume from its place. “Suppose you begin with that, and we’ll see where it leads us. What is the name of the clergyman you seek?”

  “Dodgson. Something Dodgson. Let me see.” Townsend reached into his jacket pocket and withdrew an envelope addressed to him from Skelly Auctioneers. He slipped out the mimeographed sheets inside and unfolded them. His eye went down the page to Lot # J-127. 80 Copies of a pamphlet short-titled “The True and Right Method.” Published in Bristol England, Peppercorn Press, 1884. Author: Reverend Oswald Lex Dodgson.

  “Dodgson,” said Townsend, “Oswald Lex Dodgson.”

  “I see. Well, begin with that, shall we?”

  Townsend nodded and sat down with the volume at a desk.

  He looked at the spine. Four Centuries of Victorian English Divines. Compiled by Esmond Morrison. Doubtfully, he leafed through to the D’s, through a family of Dodges, several Dodgsons, and finally, to Oswald Lex Dodgson, D.D., Cambridge, 1872.

  OSWALD LEX DODGSON, D.D., Cambridge, 1872. Dr. Dodgson was a young clergyman who was deeply concerned by the unsettling activities of Cardinal Newman’s works, the Oxford Movement, the Tractarians, and other violent upheavals in the Church of England. He viewed the internecine quarrels of the churchmen as catastrophic, in the face of the shattering theories of Charles Darwin. Gifted with a mesmerizing pulpit manner, he began a movement to rebut the conclusions of the Darwinites. A sermon, which he gave some two thousand times, helped raise one hundred thousand pounds toward the building of an anti-Darwin Bible school. The sermon was later reproduced in pamphlet form: The True and Right Method of Countering the Deleterious Effects of that Insidious, Blasphemous Work, “The Origin of Species, ” by Charles Darwin. Being A Learned Discourse on Measures for Healing The Divisions that Exist Among the Protestant Churches of England, which had considerable vogue and influence in the late 1880s. The Bible school closed its doors in 1894 for lack of funds and lack of students. Dr. Dodgson renounced his English citizenship and emigrated to America, where he amassed a large sum of money with a children’s Bible that went through fourteen editions in ten years.

  17

  Townsend reread the biography several times. He stood up, replaced the volume and walked back to the reception desk.

  He nodded at Mr. Whelkin.

  “I find,” said Mr. Whelkin, holding up a library card, “that we have a monograph by Reverend Oswald Lex Dodgson, The True and Right Method. Would you like to see it?”

  “Yes,” said Townsend quickly. “I would.”

  He followed Mr. Whelkin to another room identified as VERTICAL FILE—PAMPHLETS—HISTORIC ARCHIVES.

  Mr. Whelkin seated him at a heavy library table, then produced a pamphlet from a file cabinet. “Have a care,” he said. “It’s old and fragile.”

  Michael Townsend studied it carefully, turn
ing the pages. He read the printer’s name, address, and the date with attention. Then he smiled. Dr. Dodgson would do very nicely. Very.

  18

  The small sign, in gold letters on a rich field of red, said Tuesday is Book Auction Day. And in the main room of Skelly’s Auctioneers, a small band of professional book buyers plus a small group of amateur bibliophiles and the general public sat attentively listening to the auctioneer.

  “That last sale, ladies and gentlemen, takes us down to Lot J—121 on your sheet. And if you don’t mind, I’m going to take just a moment to consult with our recorder here on the next set of lots. Just a few moments.” As he stepped off the podium, people stood up and began to browse again through the miscellaneous cartons and piles of books, all tied with cord. A number of single volumes and small sets were displayed on one table.

  Skelly’s auctioneer tapped his gavel discreetly and cleared his voice. “All right, ladies and gentlemen. If you’ll all kindly be seated again, we’ll resume the bidding. Over on the table to my right, there.” He aimed his gavel at a crowded table. “They’re all from the Dodgson estate. Lots J—127 through J-211. We’ll start with the miscellaneous and unclassified pieces. With J—127 itself, in fact. This is a set of eighty pamphlets. All are mint copies of Oswald Lex Dodgson’s pamphlet.” He held up a copy and read the title: The True and Right Method of Countering the Deleterious Effects of that Insidious, Blasphemous Work, “The Origin of Species,” by Charles Darwin. As you know, this pamphlet is of considerable historical interest to any collector of Church of England literature during the last half of the century. Now, what am I bid for the entire lot of eighty?”

  The auctioneer waited. “Nothing? Ladies and gentlemen: I know that the Dodgson estate contains literary items of considerable value, and you know that under the laws of this state, the auctioneer is given the right to discontinue the auction of items considered to be of collector’s category if he deems that the bidders are not sufficiently aware of the value of the items to justify their sale. Now, these pamphlets are surely worth more than nothing, especially since they set the tenor for the whole lot of items. Now, am I bid something? One hundred dollars? Fifty dollars?” He waited. “Ten dollars?”